The Shadow
by Aquaman52
Summary: All I ever wanted was a chance. All I ever wanted was to be noticed, for a dream deferred to become one we both shared. And for nine months, three days, and a heartstopping ride through hell, that's exactly what I got. Companion fic to "The Pridelanders".
1. Part 1

Yeah, so first off, I actually finally had someone come right out and say my author's note were too long. I mean, I knew that the whole time, but I guess now I should really get around to shortening them now that I know y'all have just been humoring me. I don't think that's a bad assumption. Anyway, moving on.

Obviously, this isn't your average "Pridelanders" update. Essentially, this is Chapter Fifteen all over again, except the one that I had actually planned to do from the very first outline of the story. I'm funny like that. Anyway, for those of you that just stumbled across this story, "The Shadow" is a companion fic to "The Pridelanders", and as such takes a great deal of plot events, characters, and locations from it. In other words, you're not gonna have a clue what's going on if you haven't read that story all the way through. With this first part, you could get away with just knowing the first few chapters, but this fic ends exactly where Part One of "The Pridelanders" does. So get reading, new people.

For those of you who want to review, I would love some feedback on the writing style of this fic in particular. I've been trying to get rid of a lot of the old, clichéd language I've had a tendency to fall back on in the past, so any comments on that would be greatly appreciated.

I think that's all for now. Enjoy the fic. And for the record, this totally counts as a "shortened" author's note. After the one I did for the end of Chapter Seventeen, I can say that with a straight face.

* * *

**The Shadow: Part 1**

**Amani**

Sometimes it scares me how quickly the world can change.

Three days ago, I was nobody. Three days ago, I was just a shadow among ghosts, waiting for a miracle and hoping that no one would notice me in the meantime. And now, after the world had turned on its head and that miracle had been delivered right into my paws…I was still nobody. I wouldn't speak because I couldn't speak; I wouldn't act because I couldn't bear what the consequences might be. In three days, everything had changed, but I was still the same.

I was still a coward.

A blast of icy wind cut across my ears and down my back for the hundredth time. The wind that had been so strong earlier had died down a little during the night, but not enough to stop it from sneaking into the crevice I was holed up in every other minute. I'd been awake the whole night, and that was just one of the reasons why.

The other reason was fast asleep on the other side of the tiny cave, his deep brown fur fluttering in the breeze. His breathing was even, and every so often his nose would twitch in his sleep. Four times in the last ten minutes. I had counted.

Why was I like this? Why would I get so close to him and then pretend he wasn't looking at me? Why couldn't I open myself up long enough to him to see inside just once?

No, I knew exactly why. It was because I was afraid of what he would see. I was afraid he would see me like I saw me. Like everyone probably saw me.

And yet I needed him to see. I needed so desperately to have someone I could trust, someone I could _talk_ to. Someone I wouldn't have to be afraid around.

Someone like Mom.

All my life, she'd been the only one I trusted. Everyone always said I looked just like her. I had her eyes, they said, and they were right. My mom's eyes were blue as the sky and just as bright, and on those special nights when we went to the watering hole and snuggled up together by the bank, I could hardly tell the difference between the two pairs floating just beneath the water's surface. We used to go out there all the time. She used to call me her "little sunshine."

I loved those nights.

We left so fast that I never even got to say goodbye. She probably thought I had just run away from her, like all the others had their own mothers. She probably thought I was dead, and if not that she would never see me again. That we'd never share a sunset on the water's edge again. That I wasn't her sunshine anymore.

I wasn't anyone's sunshine anymore.

I didn't notice I was crying until the first tear fell onto my forepaw. The single drop slid down my fur and parted the grime of our escape like a tiny white rabbit bounding through the savannah, and then the trail it left widened and dissolved into a jumbled blur. One tear became two, and two became a hundred.

But even now, I cried quietly. Even now, I didn't want anyone to see me. I didn't want him to see me, especially like this. Especially when he was why I couldn't sleep, and why I couldn't speak, and why the last three days of my life could have been the happiest of my life if I'd only allowed them to be.

Maybe it was love. Maybe it was obsession. Maybe I just wanted someone to replace my mother. But the only thing I knew for sure was that whatever the reason, I needed Tama more than anything else in the world. And he had absolutely no idea, because in the whole time we'd been together I'd never had the courage to tell him. To him, I was always just a friend, just an accomplice. Just a shadow. And with each passing second, I knew with ever-increasing certainly that that was all I would ever be.

• • •

**NINE MONTHS EARLIER**

My mom says that when I was born, I was the tiniest thing she'd ever seen. She told me that when Rafiki handed me to her she was afraid that I would shatter into a thousand pieces if she wasn't careful. But I guess that wasn't true, because I never really got much bigger and I haven't broken yet.

I never really met my dad. I think he was there for a while when I was really little, but after that I didn't see him anymore. Mom said he went out in the grasslands one day and didn't come back. She called it "unfortunate". Her friends called it "divorce".

I didn't mind him being gone much. He was only a name with no face to me, and if Mom wasn't sad about him being gone, then I didn't have to be either. And besides, I was always happier when it was just me and Mom anyway. I don't really like being in big crowds; Mom thinks it's because I'm so small, and maybe that's true. But it's also because I'm not like them. They're loud, and I'm quiet. They like to chase and fight and talk, and I found comfort in silence. Whenever I'm with them, I always feel like I don't fit in, like I'm the one gazelle in a whole herd of zebra. I get nervous, and I don't say anything, and they think I'm weird for it. So I don't put myself in that situation much, and that suits all of us just fine.

Mostly, I just stay in the nursery with the really little cubs. All the other cubs my age wanted to get out of there as soon as they could, but I loved the place. It was a little clearing next to Pride Rock rimmed by golden spears of grass, with a shallow patch of water and a shady spot where our home towered over it. I felt safe there, mostly because words were never something anyone gave much attention to. It wasn't like the little cubs cared about which tree was biggest or who could run the fastest, and once all the older cubs left no one did. More often than not, I could close my eyes and not hear a single sign of life around me, especially at midday when everyone's legs filled with rocks and their eyes with sand under the immense heat of the sun. That was my favorite part of every day; while everyone else slept, I got to watch the clouds and feel the sun soak into my chest and wrap me up in its warmth, so that it felt I was nestled up inside it instead of lying far below it. Every day, the nursery was where I went, and every day there was a small part of me that wished someone else could be there to share the day with me. But I couldn't tell any of the other cubs; they were too busy chasing each other around and exploring the grasslands and almost getting killed by who-knows-what out there. Well, they could have all that. I was perfectly happy right here in the nursery. I traded secrets with the sun, I played tag with the wind, and on the clearest days I felt like I could fly with the clouds. I couldn't have asked for anything more.

And in a single heartbeat, all of that changed.

The day started like any other: my eyes opened to searing sunlight and my mother's scent encircling my nose, and I spent the morning lying in the shadow of Pride Rock watching the cubs in the nursery, accompanied by a very serene-looking lioness with big ears and scruffy tan fur. Mom had told me her name a few days ago, probably under the assumption that I would remember it. The cubs were spread all across the clearing: Kima was over by the grassline alternating between chasing a bright orange butterfly and his own chocolate brown tail, Kafala was curled up in an impossible tiny yellowish-orange ball by the massive wall formed by Pride Rock with only her slightly darker ears sticking out from her head like twin fallen leaves, and Jua was sunbathing on top of one of the flatter boulders that peppered the area with one thin paw poking out from under her cream-white belly. The lioness's cub, Afya, was cuddled up between her mother's paws, her bright yellow eyes following Kima's movements with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. I was almost eight months old, the oldest one there by a long shot, but I didn't feel uncomfortable at all; in fact, I felt more at ease here than I ever did in the den. It felt good to play the role of den mother, to watch them play and not have to worry about whether I would be expected to join in. And if something out of the ordinary happened, the other lioness would take care of it. It was just a normal, peaceful, perfect day.

I didn't see them coming at first; it was more like I felt them coming. The first voice didn't start soft and gradually get louder; it came out of nowhere, like there had already been a conversation going on right beside me that I was just now beginning to hear. The gravelly punch of words that came steaming around the corner was filled with a brashness that made it feel solid, made it feel like it was shoving its way into my ears and echoing through my bones. The noise propelled me onto my feet in an instant, my paws buzzing in rhythm with my chest.

"But I don't _wanna_ watch the little cubs!"

"Well, your father does, so I'd say that's highly unfortunate."

"It's what?"

"It means you're going to watch the little cubs today."

"But…"

"No buts. A little bit of responsibility won't kill you."

"How d'you know that? What if I get really sick out here and I die and the last thing you ever said to me was that I needed more responsibility?"

"Then I will personally tell Rafiki to make note of you being the first royal prince to ever die of being overly dramatic."

The higher voice dropped into a mutter, and two figures entered the clearing. The bigger one was a lioness with bold tan fur that covered all of her body except her belly and her toes, which sported a much lighter, creamier layer. Her face would've been pretty if her deep red eyes and broad nose hadn't been shoved together in a bad attempt to force back the impatience I'd heard in her voice. The smaller one was a boy that looked about my age and had a much more yellowish coat. The two were obviously related: they had the same color eyes, and the scowl on the cub's face looked like it had jumped straight from the lioness's when I wasn't looking.

I knew both of them. Everybody knew both of them. The lioness was Sarabi, the queen of Pride Rock, and that meant that the cub could only be Simba, the prince of Pride Rock and the loudest, rowdiest cub I'd ever known. Suddenly, it felt like the grass beside me had gotten in between my ribs and started scratching at my heart.

"Morning, Adia," the queen sighed to the lioness lying across the way from me.

_Adia. Her name's Adia. I knew that._

"Good morning to you too," Adia replied distantly, her quizzical look focused more on Simba than his mother. "What's with…"

"His father's idea," Sarabi answered without meeting her eyes. "Mufasa wants him to start taking more responsibility with running the kingdom."

"Little young to start Future King 101, isn't he?"

"Mufasa said it's never too early for him to start becoming a mature member of society."

Adia blinked, and the corner of her mouth twitched. "If he wanted to get the little guy out of his mane for a couple hours, he could've at least told you."

Sarabi sighed again, and her eyes took on a more pleading air. "Look, I know you hate doing this, but if you could watch him today…"

Adia's smirk rippled and grew into a grin. "Of course I'll watch him," she said. "And for the record, I don't hate doing nursery duty." Her eyes glowed as she glanced down at the little bundle of fur between her forepaws. "I get to spend more time with my little sweetpea here, in any case."

Sarabi grinned back and shook her head. "Just wait until she starts walking…" she murmured back before turning back to Simba.

"You be good now," she said as she matted down his fringe with a kiss before he could manage to squirm out of the way. "I'll come back at sunset."

"_Sunset_?" Simba moaned, rubbing at his fringe with a forepaw and twisting what little part of his face remained visible into a pout. "I have to stay here 'til sunset?"

"You'll be fine," Sarabi growled unsympathetically as she began to stride somewhat quickly towards the grass.

"No, I…ohhh…" Simba blinked a few times, and his feet began to quiver. "I don't...feel so good..." he panted as he stumbled forward, eyelids fluttering and tail drooping. He tripped once and made a big show of trying to heave himself back onto his feet, then he finally collapsed onto his back with a plaintive gasp, his ears flat and his paws sticking straight up in the air. He cracked one eye open long enough to make sure his mom was watching, then clenched it shut again.

I turned to look at Adia, who turned to look at Sarabi, who looked like she wanted to keel over herself. If the queen hadn't had her eyes closed, she probably would've thought Adia was trying to eat her own lip judging by how much of it was clamped between her teeth.

Sarabi was muttering something under her breath about how she "didn't have time for this", but Adia forced her jaws back open before I could decipher the rest of it. "Just go," she said in a forced tone. She was still trying not to laugh. "He'll get bored with it in a few minutes anyway."

For a moment, I thought Sarabi was going to reply, but she just took a slow, deep breath and gave a jerky nod before turning around again. But before she could break the barrier of grass surrounding the clearing, Adia spoke up one last time.

"Oh, and Sarabi?" she called out.

The queen turned around slowly. "Hmm?" she hummed, putting on a toothless smile for the other lioness.

"If you _and_ Mufasa want to get the little guy out of the way for a couple hours, you can go ahead and tell me that too."

I never thought I'd seen the queen speechless, but a lot of things had already happened that day that I didn't think I'd see. Once she realized her mouth was hanging open, she shut it with an audible clack from her teeth and flushed pink under her fur.

"How do you do that?" she mumbled.

Adia giggled. "Sarabi, you're the most patient lion on the planet unless it has to do with him. And he's been busy with that plague in the elephant herd for the last week." She paused for a moment, then glanced down at the ground for a second before giving Sarabi a sly look. "And besides all that, your tail's been twitching for the last minute and a half."

Red gave way to maroon, and Sarabi's tail dropped like a rock. "Um…" she stammered, keeping steady eye contact with her front paw toes. "Yeah, I'll just, uh…I'll just…"

"Be going now?"

"Yeah."

Another good-natured chuckle crept out of Adia's throat. Sarabi nodded again, paused for a moment, then took off at a brisk yet still dignified trot.

I didn't know what was going on, but I knew that I liked Adia now. She seemed like a happy sort of lion, and she didn't look uncomfortable at all when she talked to the queen. I couldn't ever look at her when she spoke to me. I would stammer out a few words, then my mom would step in and smile apologetically, whispering something about how shy I was while my face burned and my throat ached. I could imagine myself talking to the queen; I could even imagine myself talking to Adia right now, joking and laughing with her just like she did with the queen. But I knew that I could think about talking all I wanted and the words would still ensnare themselves in the back of my throat, and nothing would come out. So I kept on imagining. I imagined that I was big and strong and confident and that I didn't feel afraid of anything. I imagined myself a whole other world where I was the one that everyone wanted to talk to, where I wasn't just a shadow on the den floor.

Not a shadow. It was an exhilarating thought: to not be scared. To be brave like my mom. Like Simba. Like everyone else. Like a normal cub.

And then I thought, maybe if I imagine it hard enough, it'll happen. And so I did. And it worked. I told myself that I wasn't a shadow, and I started believing it. I felt my paws grip the earth and the wind lift my head, and I felt like I was the biggest lioness in the world. I wasn't a shadow anymore.

And I was so busy not being a shadow that I didn't notice the new one right next to me until Adia started speaking to it.

"Well, hello there, Tama," the still smiling lioness said. "You looking for Simba?"

To my unsuspecting ears, her voice was a thunderclap. A shudder shot from my nose all the way down to the tip of my tail, and I was my old self again. My heart was pounding, my paws were trembling, and I was afraid. And I hated it. I hated myself for being this way. I looked down at the ground just as my eyes filled with tears. I had one little speck of bravery, like a tiny blue flower in a sea of thorns, and now that flower was buried in spiky blackness again. I couldn't have brought my head back up if my life depended on it.

"Yeah," the new shadow replied. It was a boy's voice, a little deeper than Simba's and a lot calmer. He was probably one of Simba's friends. So that meant he probably hadn't even noticed me yet.

Good. Right now, I think I preferred being invisible.

"My mom said he was over here, so I…" he continued a moment later before stopping suddenly. "Is that him?"

I sucked in a big breath and looked up, finally snapping the sheen of ice holding my neck captive. The shadow belonged to another cub that was smaller than Simba but still bigger than me. His fur was well-groomed, rusty-brown on his head, back, and tail and a paler hazelnut color on his chest and stomach. He was thin, but not dramatically; if anything, he was fit where Simba was a little pudgy. I couldn't make out much of his face, but then he turned a bit and I saw a slightly unkempt tuft of fur atop his head, a surprisingly small nose balanced on the end of a scruffy tan muzzle…

And his eyes.

I could only see his left eye from where I was standing, but I couldn't imagine the other one being anything less than its brother. It was a deep, rich brown color, a bit darker than his fur but close enough that I probably couldn't have told the difference from farther away. It was lively, but not like Simba's. Simba's eyes glowed with boundless energy; Tama had a different, almost muted light in his. If Simba's eyes housed a roaring wildfire, Tama's held the wind and the rain that would keep it under control. I knew immediately that he and Simba were best friends…but even more than that, I was simply hypnotized by that one peaceful, comforting, alluring orb. Even just looking at it now, when I was barely even in his sight, made my little flower of courage blossom with pride. I wanted to be brave and strong, if only so that he would look my way. If only so that light could be pointed at me.

"That would be our king-to-be, yes," Adia answered with the air of someone holding back a sigh.

"Why is he on his back?"

"He's very sick."

"From what?"

"Hard work, I assume."

"I thought that never killed anyone."

"Tell him that."

"Huh." After another long pause, Tama shrugged and laughed. His laugh was just like his eyes: quiet and reserved, but spirited all the same. I tried to swallow and almost choked. When had my throat gotten so dry?

With a faint smile still fluttering across his lips, Tama padded forward and prodded Simba in the belly with a forepaw. "Simba…" he called out. "What are you doing?"

"Dying," came his golden friend's scratchy reply.

"Uh-huh. Why are you dying?"

"Because I have to stay here all day."

"In the nursery? What's so horrible about that?"

Simba's eyes cracked open for the first time since his mother left. "Well, because it's…it's boring here!" he answered, as if were the most obvious thing in the world. "There's nothing to do!"

Tama's brow rose ever so slightly. "Nothing? What about helping with the little cubs? That'd be fun, right?"

Simba rolled onto his stomach and flicked his tail to shake off the dust from his resting place. "No, it wouldn't," he argued back with a skeptical glance in his friend's direction. "They're all small and squirmy and whiny and and…_get off my tail!_"

Simba flicked his tail again, this time with much more force, and Kima took flight as he was launched from where he had pounced on Simba's twitching tuft over into the nearby grass. His rolled back out not even a second later, completely unfazed and giggling like crazy. "Again, again!" he squealed as he tried to latch onto Simba's tail again, but he fell short and skidded a couple feet too far before he lost interest and resumed chasing his own tail. I clapped my paw over my mouth before I could laugh as loud as Adia and Tama were.

Simba glared at his friend and huffed out a heavy sigh, directing it upwards so it ruffled through his messy fringe. "This stinks," he muttered as he scrambled to his feet and checked his tail for teeth marks.

"Oh, c'mon, it's just one day," Tama answered back, his cheeks bulging and his voice as tight as a coiled string. He cleared his throat and put on a less amused face as Simba turned around and glared again. "This'll be fun. We'll just hang out here and play with the little cubs for a while."

"You think watching little cubs all day is fun?" Simba grumbled. "Geez, Tama, you're such a girl sometimes…"

Tama smirked. "Says Simba, drama queen of the Pridelands…"

"Shut up!"

Another laugh parted the silence. He had the most interesting laugh I'd ever heard: short and powerful and still as delicate as the breeze it traveled on. When I heard it, the sun seemed to flash brighter for just a moment, and I felt it all the way down to my toes: heat, creeping up my legs and tickling my ears and curling up somewhere between my stomach and my heart. I felt a little sick, but at the same time it felt like a sickness that I didn't ever want to get better from.

_What's happening to me?_

"Sorry about that," Tama said playfully. "Simba's cool most of the time, but he hates working. He'll be fine in a little bit."

Adia didn't reply; I could only assume she had simply nodded. I was a bit preoccupied with trying to wipe the color from my face, but every time I thought about what had caused it, it just got redder and redder. Maybe I just needed to lie down somewhere for a while. Then I'd be okay. And I almost left, except Tama was standing between me and the splotch of grass I was planning on hiding behind. And as I turned my head up, I had the strangest feeling that he was looking at me.

And then I met his eyes and realized that he _was_ looking at me.

"I'm Tama, by the way," he continued, stepping a bit closer and sending a warm smile my way. He was talking to me. Me. I would've run, but my legs might as well have taken root in the dusty soil. He was talking to me, and he was looking at me with his friendly brown eyes, and if my heart didn't working again in the next ten seconds they would be the last thing I ever saw.

I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat was even drier than before. I glanced away, swallowed hard, and looked up again. And somehow, seeing his eyes again made my heart kick into overdrive, and that made my mouth do more or less the same.

"Amani," I gushed. It wasn't my normal voice that I heard; it was a whisper, hardly even a squeak, like I was a little field mouse staring up into the maw of a starving hyena. A thousand things to say rushed forward and crammed into my mouth, but my throat closed up again and none of them escaped to tell Tama how nervous I was or how surprised I was or how his eyes sparkled like jewels when the sunlight shone onto them. Tama's eyebrows rose again, and then he smiled.

"Um…nice to meet you, Amani," he said. "I don't think I've ever seen you with everyone else. You hang around here a lot?"

I nodded.

"I don't blame you. I always kinda liked this place…guess when you grow up with something, a little part of it stays with you, right?"

I nodded again, and the corners of my mouth arced into a tight-lipped smile that wouldn't go away even after its recipient fell silent. Tama glanced down at the ground and smiled too, and I could've sworn it was a blush that I saw pooling under his fur. When he looked up again, his face was clear, but I noticed the change in his eyes right away. Talking with Simba, his eyes had been solid as stone: full of equal parts amusement and confidence. I guess then, he had known what would happen next, how Simba would react and what he could say in reply. But now, both of those things were gone, and in their place was something that looked more like confusion. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but just like I had done before his jaw clamped shut without confirming that intention. For a long moment, we just stood there and stared at each other. And for a slightly shorter moment, I had the craziest thought that maybe he was just as nervous about meeting me as I was about meeting him.

"Y'know, I should…I should go help Simba," he said quietly, sounding like the choice of words hadn't been entirely his. He grinned again, but awkwardly. "He's gonna need it."

Silence again. "Do you, um…" he started to say. "Do you wanna come with?"

I thought I wouldn't be able to answer, so I concentrated hard on forcing the words through my lips. But the sound wasn't a squeak like before. "Yeah!" I almost shouted. "I mean…yeah. Yeah, I…I'll come with you."

I don't think Tama had any idea what was going on, but after a bit it didn't look like he cared anymore. "Cool," he said, his eyes beaming. And before I knew it, he was walking back over to where Simba had crawled off to sulk. And I was walking with him.

And it wasn't until we reached the prince and Tama glanced over at me one last time that I realized that, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I wasn't afraid at all.

• • •

True to his word, Tama stayed with us in the nursery until the sun was only a messy scoop of orange and red melting into the horizon. Simba calling him a girl didn't seem to affect him in the least; he actually looked like he was enjoying himself, or at least he was faking it much better than Simba was. The whole day was a blur for me. Tama and I didn't talk to each other again, but I could feel his eyes on me all the way. And I knew he had to feel mine on him.

The next day, he found me on the way to the nursery. His ears perked up and his eyes smiled with his lips, but the fire that had given me strength the day before only ate away at it today. "Hi, Amani," he said, and I could only stare in response, my stomach churning and the proper response stuck fast to the roof of my mouth. When his ears fell again and he looked away, I had to blink hard to keep from crying.

From then on, I made it my sole purpose in life to return Tama's greeting each and every morning. We would pass each other, say hello, and keep walking. It lasted no more less than a second, but it would be all I could think about for the rest of the day.

My mom always asked who he was, and I always said the same thing: just a friend, just a friend, just a friend. She was more than happy with that, though; I'd never called anyone my friend before. Eventually, she stopped asking, and started telling.

"You should go talk to him more often."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"I don't know…"

"Well, that's not a very good reason, is it?"

No. It wasn't. But there it was: I wouldn't talk to him because I couldn't talk to him. Because if I talked to him, I would stutter and mash my words together like I had that day in the nursery, and then he would think I was weird too. And I could handle that with all the rest of the cubs. I didn't like it, but I had told myself so many times that I wasn't like them that I was comfortable with accepting it as fact. But Tama wasn't like them, because if there was one thing that scared me more than being stuck in front of a hundred million lions the size of the sky, it was that he would be like all the rest. That he would decide he didn't like me.

So I never gave him the chance. I was friendly to him for one word, and that was all I could manage. All I could risk. And somewhere deep inside I knew that if I kept doing that, he would give up. He would either be too frustrated to keep trying to be nice, or he would show that he'd never really cared all that much in the first place and I was easy to forget about. But if I could imagine for just a moment that all that was a lie, that there was something about me that would keep him coming back every day for the rest of our lives, then I was going to grab hold of that and never let it go. And so for a while, that was all my life consisted of. Just one word every morning, and a hundred questions every night.

And then the king died.

I hadn't known him personally, not like my mom or her friends did. But I knew of him, and I knew that he was the reason I was born at Pride Rock and not out in the middle of the grasslands. So when he died, I felt sad, but I wasn't heartbroken. Even when I heard about Simba, there were no tears. He wasn't my friend; I had no reason to be anything other than mournful for the loss of others. But I still felt guilty about it.

Tama didn't, though. In fact, if I hadn't seen him crying in the den the night after his best friend died, I would've thought he hadn't even realized Simba was gone. He didn't mope around, he didn't spend every night staring wistfully off into the sunset like Sarabi had done for a little while…on the outside, it looked like he wasn't troubled at all.

Even when Scar kicked all the cubs out of the den and made us crawl around under Pride Rock like ants in an anthill, Tama wasn't fazed. As the months dragged on and everyone's ribs began to poke through their sides, Tama took over the position of de facto leader as easily as if he were the one destined to be king of Pride Rock. He couldn't get us out of the Undercroft, as he called it, but when he spoke, everyone in the place listened. And as much as I hate to admit it, I was jealous. I was jealous of his ability to mediate, to emanate confidence and reason at every hour of the day. I was jealous of his ability to pretend that he cared about broken claws and hurt feelings while the grass yellowed and the watering hole contracted into nothing more than an ambitious puddle and the trees cried sap from their drought-induced wounds. I was jealous of his strength, and I wanted more than anything to have it. I was terrified of it too, but that only made it more alluring.

We still didn't talk much, but I was a constant presence by his side. I only saw my mother when she had a few spare minutes between her endless hunts, and she was always exhausted when those minutes came around, so in a way Tama almost took her place. I hardly even knew him, and yet I felt like I trusted him more than anyone else in the whole pride. Whenever I was around him, I would take in a bit of his courage and project it onto my face, so that no one would see anything but calm. So that I would look like him. And it worked; in just a month, I felt just as comfortable with him as I did with Mom. And I think Tama felt comfortable around me too. At the end of every day, his face would be as weary and raggedy as Mom's, but when he came near me it was like his mask of authority lifted away and he was the old Tama again, the one that joked around with Simba and smiled at me and blinked his eyes a lot whenever I looked at them for too long. That was how I knew he hadn't forgotten Simba; I think I was his link to his old life as much as he was my link to the rest of mine. He was the towering baobab tree, and I was the hidden pond that kept it growing. And still we never spoke. But somehow, it felt like we didn't even have to.

It wasn't until five months after we moved to the Undercroft that I began to realize that something wasn't right, that there was something going on that I wasn't aware of. I'll never forget how Tama's eyes looked that first day in the nursery: flickering like two lumps of smoldering wood, just waiting for the single spark that would set them ablaze. After Simba died, it seemed like the spark had already run its course; his eyes were still big and round, but the life that had been in them was gone. At first, I had thought it was because of Simba; later, I had thought it was because he was exhausted from all the responsibilities he had taken on. But after a while, I noticed something else there as well, something that I'd seen in my mother's eyes every time she visited and frozen in the glassy gazes of all the kills she brought home.

Fear.

Something huge was gnawing away at Tama bit by bit, had been ever since Scar became king. But it wasn't just fear of starving or the hyenas; everyone knew those far too well by now. His was a different breed, and once again I had my mother to thank for my being able to recognize it. Mom looked afraid because she knew she wasn't supposed to be down in the Undercroft; none of the lionesses were. Scar didn't allow us nearly enough food to feed twenty cubs, so whatever Mom and her friends could sneak out of the pile for Scar and the hyenas, they would give to us. There was never enough for everyone, and if a cub got sick there was nothing we could do about it. Two months after Scar took over, Kafala started coughing in her sleep. Three days later, we buried her under a sickly baobab that had once held every kind of bird in the sky. Two days after, we buried her mother right next to her, and over the next seven months two other cubs joined them. Everywhere I went I'd hear mutters of rebellion, but there were too many hyenas and the lionesses weren't getting any more to eat than we were. And yet they still tried to bring us food.

If Scar caught any of them in the act, there was no telling what he would do, and so that was Mom's fear: that she would be caught and punished, maybe even killed. And I saw that same look of pure animal terror in Tama's eyes every day. The look of someone who was always looking over their shoulder, who didn't know who they could trust and who would claw them in the back the second they turned it.

The look of someone with something to hide.

It wasn't just the look in his eyes that caught my attention. Tama was never at Pride Rock much during the day, but once I started paying more attention I began to notice a strange pattern to his actions. Every day, Tama would wander in and out of the Undercroft until the sun was about three-quarters across the sky, and then he would disappear for about two hours. It happened almost every day without fail, and he was always tired when he came back. A few times, he was even a little wet. I don't think anyone else had picked up on it but me…but then again, I don't think anyone else was watching him as closely as I was either.

Once the seed of curiosity about what Tama was hiding was planted, it grew constantly inside my head. Watered every day by his sagging jowls and his mysterious disappearances, its vines stretched deeper and deeper into my brain, until it became all I could think about. I couldn't figure out why it was so distracting, but nothing my brain had done in relation to Tama had ever made much sense. By then, I had more or less gotten used to not knowing what my mind was going to churn itself into when I saw his eyes and felt his presence beside me at night.

After nine months, I decided I couldn't wait any longer. I met Tama outside the Undercroft just as he was returning from one of his daily trips, when the whole of the Pridelands was bathed in twilight. He didn't see me until I asked him in the most confident voice I could manage where he had been. Even then, the cricket chirps cascading through the air around us almost swallowed up the words before they could even get close to his ears, but judging by how high he jumped the moment after I spoke, I guess the words got close enough.

For just a bit too long of a moment, Tama looked like he didn't know what to say. "I was…I was visiting my dad," he finally said haltingly. "He, um…he lives with another pride out in the grasslands, so I go out and visit him sometimes." He tried to smile and met some invisible resistance perched above his upper lip. "That's all."

He was lying. I knew right from the start, when his eyes widened with panic and his legs went stiff as the gigantic stone we lived under. And I knew when he shifted his paws in the dust when he spoke, and when he never looked me in the eyes, and when I realized that that invisible resistance looked more like guilt than anything else. I didn't know why he would lie to me, and I had a feeling, maybe nothing more than a foolish dream, that he didn't exactly know either.

But I was sure as heck going to find out.

When my mom came to visit that night, I met her on the fringe of the Undercroft just like I had done with Tama. She was accompanied by two other lionesses, each of them working together to drag two almost untouched wildebeest behind them. It still wasn't enough food for all of us, but it was much better than what we usually got.

"Hey, sunshine," Mom sighed as she dropped her kill and surveyed the darkening landscape behind her to check for hyenas. "How you doing?"

"Good," I replied. My mind was still buzzing from my earlier encounter with Tama, so I got right to the point. "Mom, who was Tama's dad?"

"What, honey?" Mom murmured a bit absentmindedly. She wasn't as quick as she used to be; no one was. The drought and the loss of the herds had dried up our thoughts just as much as the grasses and the watering hole. "Oh, um…you know, I don't really know much about him. I guess he was part of Maji's old pride. Why, did someone ask you about him?"

"No, I just…I was just wondering." I leaned down and took a bite out of the wildebeest before my mom could see me blush. There wasn't anything going on. Tama was just nervous, and I thought he was lying to me. Why hadn't I figured that out by now?

Mom raised her brow, but didn't press the matter. "All right, then," she said. "How is Tama doing, by the way? His mom's been stuck out hunting for a while, so she wanted me to ask you."

I almost choked. "Why does she want to ask me?" I managed to cough after a giant swallow of meat.

"Well, I told her you've been hanging around him a lot…"

"Why did you tell her?" I interrupted in what was almost a hiss.

My mom looked confused. "Was it a secret?"

"Well, it…yeah, kind of..." My face was burning again.

"Well, then, you might want to tell Tama that too…he's been talking about you a lot, apparently."

Before then, I'd never really understood how someone could feel like they were floating unless they had jumped off a cliff or something. I was learning a lot today. "He…"

"Oh, yeah. He's quite a chatterbox. Maji says you're all he ever talks about."

_Any time you want to start working again, heart, that'd be great._

I tried to reply, but my throat was dry as a desert. I buried my nose in the wildebeest again, but not before I saw a knowing smile spread across my mom's face.

"What?" I muttered through a full mouth without looking up.

"Nothing," she chuckled, looking much happier than she had earlier. I didn't get what was so funny. Maybe she was hungrier than I'd thought.

"So, any other burning questions about Tama?" she asked a moment later. I almost said no, but then I remembered one last thing. She probably wouldn't know the answer, but I figured I might as well try.

"Where does Tama's dad live?" I said as my internal organs finally started functioning properly again.

My mom's eyes turned down. "Well, technically, he's not living anywhere now…"

My jaw paused in mid-bite. "What do you mean?"

"Oh, he died a long time ago, honey. Before you were even born. Maji doesn't like to talk about it, but that's what she tells us whenever we ask."

And there went my heartbeat again. This was becoming a bit of a pattern.

"He's…he's dead?" I stuttered after forcing the meat in my teeth past the lump in the back of my throat.

"That's what Maji says," Mom replied without noticing my alarm. Neither of us spoke for a moment, and then Mom jumped as if she'd just remembered something important. "Crap, I gotta go," she said. She licked me on the head and pushed the wildebeest towards me. "Make sure you get enough to eat," she called back as she motioned to the other lionesses. "I'll see you tomorrow if we get back before dark."

I didn't reply, and I certainly wasn't going to be eating anything else that night. As a few other cubs trickled over and started gnawing at the wildebeest corpse in front of me, I stood stock still where I was, my stomach pitching back and forth and my mind spinning circles around me.

Tama was lying. I was right about him. And that meant that whatever he was doing, he didn't want me to find out about either.

Well, that just wasn't going to work.

It took another week for me to work up the courage to follow him. He'd come back every night and smile at me and I would smile back, and neither of us meant it. We were both trying to figure out what the other was thinking. Each of us knew the other was up to something. And for a few days, it became almost a routine. Almost like a game to see who would slip up first, who would break and spill all their secrets to the one lion they had spent every day of the last nine months with. But it wasn't a game, because there was no chance that I would lose. Partially because I wanted to know where he was going and partially because I was worried that he was doing something dangerous and that he would get hurt, but most of all because if there was one thing in the whole world that I was good at, it was keeping my mouth shut.

Finally, I was ready. Exactly one week after that last talk with Tama, I awoke to an overcast sky and the same muggy heat that penetrated the Undercroft and chased us out into the grasslands every single day pressing down on my ears. Today, it felt hotter than ever, like the air itself was being sucked into the soil and was trying to take me with it. On any other day, I would've just rolled over and gone back to sleep, but today I forced my feet to start carrying me towards the graying outside world. I was going to find out where he was going, whether he liked it or not.

There was just one problem: I couldn't find Tama anywhere.

Every day for the last nine months, he could be found somewhere around Pride Rock until mid-afternoon, and then he would leave. Every day, without exception. And now, on the one day I wanted to find out exactly where he was leaving to, he went early. I felt like screaming. This wasn't right. This wasn't like him.

With no better idea in mind, I set off into the grasslands. Over the last week, I'd noticed him going in the general direction of the river that cordoned off the Pridelands from the rest of the world about five miles from Pride Rock, so that's where I decided to go. I thought if I walked long enough, I might see him along the way.

Bad idea.

It took fifteen minutes for Pride Rock to slip down beneath the horizon behind me, and another ten for me to be hopelessly lost. Everywhere I looked there was only an unending sea of broken and yellowing grass, and the suffocating mass of dark gray clouds above me didn't even let one ray of sunshine through. I was tired, I was thirsty, and I had no clue of which way to go. And as the clouds gradually began to darken even more, I started to get scared.

After a full half-hour of wandering around looking for a familiar landmark, I stopped to catch my breath. The patch of ground underneath my aching paws was devoid of grass, but it was barely big enough for me to fit inside it without the thistly plants poking through my fur. I tried to swallow back the urge to panic, but the knot in my stomach got tighter with every second. I couldn't find Tama anywhere, and at this point I knew about as much about where my home was. Panic was looking like a pretty good option right now.

I shut my eyes tight and clenched what little of the earth wasn't occupied by prickly stalks of straw inside my paws. My whole life, I'd always felt small when I was surrounded by bigger lions, but I'd never felt more weak and insignificant than that moment when I was surrounded by nothing at all. I gripped the earth as hard as I could, and for a while it felt like that was the only thing that would keep me from falling right through it. The roaring in my ears was louder than any I'd ever heard come from a lion's throat. I wanted to cry, but that would mean I'd have to open my eyes and see all that nothing again, and I couldn't bring myself to do even that. But after a long while, when my claws felt like they were ready to snap clean off, my stomach began to unwind. I thought about finding Tama, and it loosened even more. And before I knew it, I was calm again.

And then I heard the grass rustle.

I spun around to face the noise, but it was already to the left of me. I turned towards it again, only to hear it somewhere behind me. Whatever it was sounded like it was coming from every direction at once.

And whatever it was sounded like it was coming right towards me.

Terror seared my throat again, and my body started sprinting almost before my brain could comprehend why. My legs raced. My heart flew. The grasslands blurred to a golden smear…and still the sound stayed behind me. Still the sound got even louder.

I didn't know where I was running. I didn't know whether I was running towards Pride Rock or towards the noise or farther away from both of them, but I wouldn't have stopped even if I had known. I was stuck out in the middle of nowhere, completely alone and utterly defenseless, and if whatever that thing was felt less than friendly today, I was worse than dead. I'd heard stories about the rogues and outcasts that prowled the Outlands waiting to prey on the next unsuspecting passerby; we all had when our parents had been trying to keep us close to Pride Rock. My mom never really had that problem with me, but I'd heard the same tales as everyone else. And I guess I still believed them.

Then, for the smallest glimmer of a moment, I saw it: a streak of brown against dusty yellow. I turned my head and slowed down ever so slightly, but by then it was already on top of me.

The first impact ripped the air from the lungs and sent the two of us rolling away into the grasslands, although I don't think that was the brown blur's intention judging by how tangled up his legs were in mine. But a second later, and much quicker than I had myself, he got his bearings and twisted me back under him. I landed hard on my back, and the clouds disappeared behind a shadowy mass of fur. In the instant before I shut my eyes, I saw a paw rise above my head, with claws unsheathed and glittering black. My pulse went flat, and I screamed.

But instead of killing me, the shadow held back. Then he spoke.

"Amani?"

I cracked one eye open. Tama was straddling my belly, his right forepaw still cocked and ready to strike. Confusion and shock spilled out of his eyes, and as I opened my other eye I felt the same emotions seep into my own.

Tama was the first to recover. "Gods, I…I'm sorry," he stuttered. "I thought you were…here, lemme just…"

He stumbled back a few feet and I sucked in a deep breath, and then a few more for good measure. I rolled onto my stomach, and once my legs stopped shaking I pushed myself back into a sitting position. Tama stayed back the whole time, chewing on his lip and looking horribly guilty.

"I…I'm really sorry I scared you," he said quietly as I looked up again.

I flashed him a shaky grin. "It's fine," I lied. Suddenly, I remembered why I was out here in the first place. I'd been trying to figure out where he was going…well, here he was.

"What are you doing out here?" I asked in a slightly steadier voice.

Once again, Tama hesitated. "Oh, y'know, just…visiting my dad," he replied, still stammering a bit. "I thought I already told you…"

"Your dad's dead, Tama," I said a little more forcefully than I thought I was capable of. Now that my life wasn't flashing before my eyes, adrenaline was setting my heart ablaze. "I know you're lying."

Perhaps a bit understandably, Tama looked taken aback. "How did you know th…"

"I asked my mom about you after last time. She said your dad died before I was even born. So where were you going?"

"Look, what does it even matter to you?" Tama asked in reply. "Why do you care where I go?" He narrowed his eyes and tried to stare me down. Unfortunately, it worked.

"Because I…"

_Just say it!_

"Because you…" Tama continued.

_No, don't say it…_

…what?" Tama looked confused again. "Come on, don't leave me hanging here. Why-"

"_Because I worry about you, okay?_"

Tama fell silent and went back to just staring at me. I looked at my paws for a moment, and then kept talking.

"You're the only lion besides Mom that ever talked to me," I said. "You never thought I was weird because I was shy and you never made fun of me and I guess I thought that meant you liked me, so when you started leaving I didn't know where you were going or whether you were in trouble or…"

"Hey, hey…" he interrupted, stepping forward a bit. His voice had dropped into a soothing, sympathetic tone that I'd never heard from him even when he was trying to fix something back at Pride Rock. "I'm fine. I'm not in trouble…least, so long as I don't get caught."

I was still out of breath from my last speech, so it took me a few seconds to catch on to the end of his remark. "What do you mean, 'so long as you don't get caught'?"

"Well, it's…it's kinda complicated…" Tama started to say. Then something weird happened. He looked me in the eyes, and it was like a spark had jumped from my mind to his and spun it like a top. Suddenly, it was like he couldn't wait to tell me everything.

"All right, this is gonna get out pretty soon anyway, so I'll go ahead and tell you now." He glanced left and then right, and then leaned in close to me, his whiskers tickling the inside of my ear and making me shiver just a little bit.

"Simba didn't die in the canyon," he said. "He's alive."

"Simba's alive…" I repeated slowly as Tama backed away again. Simba was alive. The cub who Scar had told us died in the gorge with his father was alive. Tama was really telling me that Simba was alive and expecting me to believe it.

And I was. For some reason I couldn't fathom, I believed every word he said. I looked in his eyes right back, and I knew beyond all doubt that if Tama said Simba was alive, then he was alive. His eyes didn't lie; they never did.

"So Scar lied?" I asked just so I could hear him say it, so I could see the relief in his eyes and know that his answer was pure.

"Yeah," Tama sighed with a smile. "Or he might not know either. I don't know…" He chuckled. "I never asked him."

The answer to my original question was suddenly obvious, as if it'd been hiding at the back of my mind the whole time and it had finally decided to make itself known. "And that's where you've been going this time, isn't it?" I said. "To see Simba."

Tama grinned again. "Yeah, I was just about to go get him for…" And he stopped again. He was holding back.

Oh, no. He wasn't going to just block off his lips and parry my concern with another lie. Not again. Not today.

"For what?" I asked innocently, but with a glare as fierce as a hyena's. He tried to bring out the lie I knew he was thinking, but I could almost see it catch in his throat and sink back down into his stomach.

"There's a little hole in the back of Pride Rock that goes into the den," he murmured guiltily a moment later. "I went in this morning, and I heard Scar talking to one of his hyenas about us…about me."

My glare disintegrated in an instant. "Who's us?" I asked. My ribs felt like they were squeezing together inside my chest.

"You know…the cubs. All of us. He's been ignoring us all this time, and now he's finally gonna get rid of us."

My chest tightened even more. "Get rid…he's gonna kill us?"

"No. At least, not in front of everybody. One of his hyenas told him to exile us, and I think that's what he's gonna do…but once he does that, there's nothing to stop him from sending out half his army to hunt us down." He shrugged. "It'd be a pretty good plan, actually…we'd all be dead, and no one could ever prove that he was involved. He probably wouldn't even tell our moms…"

"_Stop it!_" I shouted. I could hardly even breathe anymore through the lump my throat had constricted into. How could he talk so calmly about death? About _our_ deaths? How was he so calm now? Why wasn't I that calm?

Because I was petrified and Tama wasn't, that's why. I was scared of so many things involving Tama, and now this was just one more onto the pile. And that pile had finally gotten too big to me to control.

I turned away and stared off into the sun, but not before Tama caught sight of the glistening droplet fleeing my eye. "Oh, geez, I…I'm sorry, Amani," he said plaintively. Through the corner of a foggy eye, I saw his ears flatten. "I didn't mean to scare you so bad. Please don't…please don't cry."

I heard Tama shift, and then he was right next to me, scuffing his paws against the ground as if he didn't quite know what to do with them. If I had taken a deep breath right then, our sides would've touched.

"You know, I'm…I'm really scared right now too," he said quietly, and with a faint smile. "And when I get scared, I try to look at stuff as if it doesn't affect me, so I can try and fix it like someone who wasn't scared would. That's all I was doing there. Please, I'm…I'm really sorry."

I dragged a paw across my muzzle and tried to pretend I was itching my nose rather than wiping it clean. "It's okay," I sighed after a deep breath. "That's a good idea. About being scared."

His ears came alive again. "You think?"

"Yeah, it's…really smart." I took another shaky gulp of air and decided to go ahead and try his idea out. "So what are you gonna do about us being exiled?"

"I'm gonna sneak everyone out tonight, and I thought I could use Simba's help so I was going to go get him just now," he answered. "Maybe everyone'll listen better if I tell them that he's coming."

"What if they don't believe you?"

"Then I'll…" Tama sighed. "I'll figure something out."

The heartbeat it took me to make my decision seemed to take longer than the whole rest of our conversation combined. "I can help," I said.

For a brief second, Tama looked surprised, but more than that he looked overwhelmingly relieved. "Really?" he asked. "You're not…I mean, you're gonna be okay with that?"

"Yeah. I mean, all I have to do is just tell everyone you're not crazy, right? I can do that."

_Probably._

But if I'd ever had any doubts about whether I could follow through on that promise, the smile that broke over Tama's face stole them all away. He was elated, and I couldn't tell whether it was because someone had believed him or because that someone was me. Deep down in my heart, I knew exactly which one I was hoping for.

"Yeah, that'd be awesome," he laughed. "So can you cover for me while I go get Simba?"

Well, what was one more promise? Another grin from Tama and I would've jumped over the moon if he'd asked me. "Sure," I said. "When are you gonna be back?"

"I don't know…a couple hours, maybe. Just tell 'em I'm getting something important, okay?"

"Got it."

His innocent grin softened into a bashful one, probably after he'd realized how big it had been before. "Thanks," he said. "Thank you so much."

I don't know how much time passed between then and when he started walking away, but all I remember were his grateful eyes framed by a brown pelt and a canopy of blue horizon and frothy white clouds. He took a few steps, then turned around and smiled again.

"You know, it's really brave of you to want to do this for me," he said.

I couldn't bring myself to look at him, but when I looked down the fire in my cheeks blazed even brighter. "I don't know…" I mumbled back.

"C'mon, would I lie?"

"Yes," I said without thinking. I almost bit my tongue trying to clamp my jaw shut, but Tama was already staring back with wide eyes. Then he laughed, and my heart seemed to leap free of its moorings and soar into the sky.

"Yeah…" he admitted. "Well, I'm not now."

I smiled too, and for the first time that day I didn't want to hold it back. "I know," I said softly back.

He stood there for a bit longer, and though he was still ten feet away I could have closed my eyes and sworn he was sitting beside me again. My heart still hadn't come back from its unscheduled flight, and that was perfectly all right with me.

"See you later," he said, before turning back around to leave. And as I watched his paws step delicately over each clump of untamed grass and his tail swing lazily behind him, my heart came plummeting back to earth and my tongue caught in my throat. I couldn't speak, or I didn't want to speak, or I was just finally going completely insane. In retrospect, I think it was all three.

"See you later," I finally whispered when he was much too far away to hear. But he did turn around one last time as if he knew I had said it all the same. His eyes glimmered, and his tail twitched in time with the corners of his mouth.

Then he stepped forward, dove into the yellow sea of the grasslands, and was gone.

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As I said before, reviews are always appreciated. I'm nearly finished with the next chapter of "Growing Down", so that should be up soon as well. Peace out.


	2. Part 2

A wild UPDATE appeared! Dylan used Procrastination! It's not very effective...

Dylan used Get Up Off Your Lazy Ass And Post! It's super effective!

I actually have two parts done right now, which is officially my excuse for this taking...four months. God. That part's being betaread right now, so it should be up fairly soon. I just wanted to put _something_ up so the few of you that don't hate me will continue to not blaspheme my name on a daily basis.

...you guys don't really do that, do you? Please?

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**The Shadow – Part 2**

**Amani**

I walked back to Pride Rock with only the tiniest corner of my brain focused on putting one foot in front of the other. The rest of it was still analyzing the nerve-wracking conversation I'd just had with Tama, each slight movement of his eyes and tender word from his mouth replaying enough times to ensure that I'd probably remember it vividly for years. Was that his heart I saw spreading across his face, or just an outburst of relief? A blissful moment shared with his best friend, or an efficient usage of a comrade in arms? I didn't know, and I had a feeling I never would, no matter how many times I repeated his words under my breath. But for the time being, that reality could stay cooped up in that tiniest corner with my basic motor skills, where it belonged.

What did come to the forefront of my mind soon after he left was the undeniable fact that I was still lost in the middle of nowhere. But I knew that Tama had been coming from Pride Rock, and I knew that he'd probably be leaving the same way for months now. So not even a full minute had passed before I found it: a gap in the grass, hardly even noticeable unless you knew to look for it, that marked Tama's continual path to Simba and the river. His lingering scent, an unobtrusive aroma of something minty and seemingly touched with dust, seemed to seep out of every broken grass blade and errant pebble, and following it all the way back home was as easy as it would have been if he himself had been leading me. I didn't stop once, but with my nose and my head the way they were, it was probably better that I didn't. The cracking soil beneath my paws was one of the few things keeping me at least somewhat tethered to earth; a minute of rest would probably mean an hour or more of lying motionless on the ground, burrowed deep into a place that was part imagination, part memory, and all a brown, slightly dirty cub with sparkling eyes and a paw around my shoulder. So I kept walking, and before I knew it I was back in the Undercroft, surrounded by a whole host of cubs I had only an inkling of what to do with.

There were two parts to the Undercroft, only one of which you could see from the outside. The part you couldn't see was the cavern, a damp and poorly ventilated scoop of silt and dirt that harbored a stuffy, humid heat every hour of the day. It was nice when the nights were cold, but I could count the number of cold nights we'd had in the last three hundred on one paw. So most of the time, everyone just stayed in the outer section that was nothing more than a sparse clearing under the main promontory of Pride Rock. There, we could at least have shade without it suffocating us too. That was where I found myself now, and that was where eighteen other cubs were currently shimmering in the afternoon sun like fish in a summer-lit watering hole. Eighteen cubs that Tama would speak to in just a few hours, and eighteen cubs that I would have to convince to listen to him.

Stupid promise. Stupid Tama. Stupid me for believing him. It was ridiculous, everything he said was ridiculous, and yet here I was, ready to dive into the water and tell the school that salvation was just a day's walk away. I had a thousand questions for Tama now, much too late for any of them to be feasible. Most of them having to do with how I was supposed to stand in front of a crowd where we'd be outnumbered ten to one.

I stopped short of the rim of darkened earth that signaled the entrance to the Undercroft. I wasn't going to do this. I didn't want to do this; I had just thought I did when I saw Tama's bravery and thought I was brave too, but I'm not because I'm small and I'm weak and I'm Amani and he's Tama.

But I promised him. And he believed me.

That was when it hit me. He believed me when I said I'd help. He'd seen me every day, known me better than anyone else, and he believed me. He was walking in the grasslands right now with no fear of his return, because he knew that I was there, and that I believed him. I was his hope, his little blue flower inside his chest as he was mine. And we would be the hope for the other cubs.

Hope. That was what drove him forward and kept his legs moving and his heart beating and his mind at ease. It wasn't bravery; it was hope. And if all he needed was a bit of hope, then I had enough to last the both of us. Escape would mean freedom. Escape would mean a life of motion, a life of stress and danger stalking us beneath every breath of wind…but we would be together. And he would need me more than ever. And maybe, if we both hoped enough, our little blue flowers would grow and grow until they covered the skies and cloaked us all in everlasting peace.

And we would be together.

Before ten seconds had passed, I was inside the Undercroft, the shadow of the overhang washing over me and offering no resistance. A new feeling filled my chest, like I was roaring without sound. But the roar, or whatever it was, wasn't silent because it was trapped; it seeped out through my eyes and out of my ears and the little cracks between my toes. Nothing could touch me, not the cubs in here or even any of the hyenas outside. Because I already had something they didn't, something only a few of them would be allowed to share.

Hope.

I saw the first question coming long before it left its owner's mouth. The cub that approached me, a brown-furred, blue-eyed (A/N: Yeah, I know I said Tojo had brown eyes earlier on, but I've since come to realize that that isn't correct. So once again, I will be retconning some stupid-ass mistake I made back when I was writing entire chapters in single days.), and sandy-chested boy with a few traces of a paunch still gathered around his stomach, did so with a giddy, almost reckless abandon, as if he didn't quite know where he was going but was perfectly content to just find out once he got there. I had seen him before, if not here then definitely months ago, when we all shared the nursery. _Tojo_, I thought, _or maybe Tani_. _ Something like that._

"Hey, were you the one that was talking with Tama last night?" he asked. Definitely Tojo. I remembered a cub in the nursery that was as blunt as he was naïve, and he looked for all the world like a slightly bigger clone of his younger self. He had always had some little creatures following him around; I wanted to say birds, but when I thought about it, it didn't really make much sense that a lion cub would let half a dozen flying feathered appetizers stick around him for very long. In any case, they weren't here now.

"Yeah, I was," I answered, pairing the words with a nod.

For a moment, Tojo almost looked surprised that I had replied. Or maybe his face always looked like that. "Oh…" he said. "Well, did he say where he was going today? 'Cause no one around here knows, and usually he's here right now, so…"

"He's fine," I interrupted. I was bursting at the seams with pride at how well I was holding up, but I managed to keep most of it out of my voice. "He'll be back in a couple hours. He has something important to tell everyone."

Tojo's face fell slightly. "He…he told you all that?"

The fire in my belly burned down to a simmer. "What d'you mean, he told me all that?" I asked hesitantly.

It didn't take Tojo long to catch on to my mood swing. "Oh, well, I didn't mean he shouldn't have told you or anything, it's just…y'know, I thought he woulda let me in on it too, is all."

"Does he usually tell you what he's doing?"

"Well…no. Not usually. But sometimes! And there was this one time where we found this huge pile of…"

Thankfully, Tojo was the type that stuck with whatever story he was telling until the very end, even if no one else was listening. While the pudgy cub continued to pontificate on every single one of the three times Tama had supposedly entrusted him with some great measure of authority, I edged towards the back of the cave and eventually slipped away.

I allowed myself a single sigh of relief once Tojo was out of sight. Okay, so maybe I hadn't said much, but Tama never said I had to be the one to actually break the news or anything like that. I was just the assistant if he needed it; just like Tojo, only perhaps a bit less enraptured by the opportunity. Or at least, a bit less openly enraptured.

It wasn't until I reached the spot Tama and I usually occupied during our evenings together that I got a tingly, uncomfortable feeling near the middle of the back. Somehow, I knew that someone was watching me, and that whoever it was wasn't doing so just out of curiosity. For a brief moment, I held onto the faint hope that it was just Tojo hunting me down to make sure I didn't miss the climax of his tale, but as soon as I turned around that hope was swept away by a pair of narrowed, ruby-red eyes located right smack in the middle of the shaded clearing. The eyes were set above a petite nose and a long, almost ovular muzzle, and were connected to a body that seemed to strike a perfect balance between dainty and muscular and provided a perfect backdrop for an exquisitely clean tan coat that seemed to keep its luster even through the shadows of the Undercroft. She was gorgeous, and if she had been any older I'm sure she would've had a dozen other cubs vying for her attention. But right now, all of it was focused on me, and her gaze wasn't one of admiration or even indifference. In fact, I could've sworn she was judging me, as if I was just a zebra or an impala in a herd of hundreds and she was just sizing me up to determine whether I'd be her next meal. She didn't look away when I got to the spot I had been eyeing since my escape from Tojo, nor did she so much as blink when I lied down and curled up as if to nap away the hours until Tama arrived. But I had no chance of getting one minute of sleep with her watching me. I didn't know who she was, really; I'd seen her bicker with some other cubs, Nala most of all, but I'd never spoken to her and, as far as I knew, she'd never even looked at me before now. I wasn't even completely sure I knew her name. All I could remember hearing was something like Uzuri or Uruzi.

Well, I guess the name Uzuri would've fit her well. She _was_ beautiful. Amazingly beautiful. Much more beautiful than me.

The next two hours were the most uncomfortable of my entire life. I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't quite bring myself to stand up and walk over to Uruzi or Uzuri or whoever she was and make her please tell me why exactly she was staring at me as though I had a second head growing out of my tail tuft, if she would be so kind. So I stayed put, my eyes closed and my skin crawling, and my mind constantly reminding me how Tama would've walked right up to her and taken her stares in stride, how Tama would've exuded nothing but confidence in such a trivial situation. How I would've done the same thing if I could be like him for just a moment.

But I couldn't even look her in the eyes, much less confront her. And I couldn't figure out what I was afraid of either. That she would know I had noticed her? That she wouldn't care if I did? That she _would_ care? I had a dozen dark black passages in front of me, all of them identical and none of them inviting. So I stayed just on the fringe, glancing over just often enough to keep us both guessing. And it was during one of these glances—something like the twentieth—that I finally saw the shadowy paths disappeared.

She turned away without blinking, as if her eyes had only been passing over me and just been held up by some unforeseen force for the last two hours. The new focus of her attention, a brownish blob that blended in almost perfectly with the craggy stone hanging above our heads, flitted into the corner of my vision and then out again, but I was too relieved to be out of the spotlight that at the moment I didn't particularly care who was there now. After a few seconds, though, curiosity got the best of me, and I turned towards the new arrival. I blinked as the brilliant reds and golds of the impending sunset bled down from the promontory and dripped down into my eyes, then blinked again.

It was Tama.

I barely had time to process his arrival and he barely had time to fully enter the Undercroft before she was upon him. He stopped suddenly as she stepped into his path, but he didn't look surprised at all. In fact, he almost looked like he had expected the intrusion, as if this girl was just one of the many trifles he was forced to endure on a daily basis.

"Hello, Tama," she said in a strangely low, almost sultry voice, one that I could tell wasn't her normal one from the way it cracked ever so slightly at the beginning of Tama's name. She was putting on an act for him, and judging by the steady look of disinterest on his face, he wasn't buying it.

"Hey, Uruzi," Tama sighed with a nod in her direction, glancing away behind her for a moment before somewhat lethargically meeting her eyes again. Uruzi's stare was unwavering, an occasional bat of her eyelids the only exception.

"We were wondering where you'd run off to," she crooned, and I shuddered as my stomach twinged and flipped. She sounded like she was absolutely enamored with all things Tama, and for some reason that made me want to puke up every last bite of the rushed breakfast I had forced down that morning.

"And by 'we', you mean you?" Tama answered with a faint smile. Now it felt like my whole insides were slowly being crushed into a single mass of nausea and pain.

"Well, I'm sure everyone else was just as worried."

"Mm-hmm. What do you want this time?"

"Oh, I don't want anything, really…" Uruzi's smirk widened. "That is, nothing you can't easily provide."

"Could I get by, please?"

"Oh, c'mon, Tama…just tell me where you went today, at least."

Tama cocked his left eyebrow, just like I'd seen him do every time he couldn't quite believe what he had just heard. "You really want to know?"

"Only if you want to tell me," Uruzi replied as she drew in close to Tama, her eyelids fluttering and her chest almost touching his.

Tama looked away again, towards the opposite end of the clearing from where I was. He frowned for a moment, then lifted his lips into a smile.

"All right, I'll tell you," he said as my heart sank and my teeth grit together involuntarily. Well, so much for a secret for just the two of us. How many other cubs had known before me?

"Really?" Uruzi said, sounding a bit taken back.

"Sure…" Tama continued, but now I could see the slightly devilish tinge to his smirk. "In about twenty minutes, when I tell everyone where I've been going."

Uruzi's face fell as a toothless grin unfolded across Tama's lips, and if he had turned in my direction for just a moment he would've seen me float right off into the ceiling. But instead, he waited a moment to let the moment sink in, then spoke up again.

"Always a pleasure," he said curtly, deftly stepping around her while blowing out a sigh that ruffled the mess of brown fur stretching down over his forehead. His eyes began to sweep the Undercroft again, but this time they ceased their search almost immediately. The moment he caught sight of me, his smile returned and he made a beeline for the relatively secluded corner I had chosen to occupy. I didn't know what to make of that, but all the parts I could see now were enough to keep me satisfied with confusion.

"Hey, Amani," Tama said, with what seemed like a genuine glow of warmth flaring in his eyes. "You still ready to help?"

It took me a few seconds to realize that I hadn't answered him yet. "Oh, yeah, I…I guess so."

If he hadn't already seen my fading shell shock when he walked up, that patchy reply might as well have lit it up like a torch. "You all right?" he asked. "You nervous?"

"No, of course I'm not nervous," I lied back. "It's just that, um…"

Well, it wasn't like I'd be able to keep the words down for much longer anyway. Even with his last remark to her in mind, I still felt a hunger deep in my stomach that would only be sated by another shot of hope.

"Uruzi sure seems to like you a lot," I said with carefree candor, doing my best to keep my eyes on Tama and almost succeeding.

And there it was: Tama smirked and rolled his eyes, and let out what sounded like a scoff. "Not as much as she makes it look," he murmured back. "She always goes after whoever's the most popular. If Simba were here, I bet she wouldn't even know I existed."

_I would, _the green-hued monster inside my head grumbled. Okay, so maybe there had been a hint of jealousy licking at the base of my nonchalance. I was allowed to have emotions, wasn't I?

Thankfully, I didn't have to explain that right to Tama just yet; right as the beast subsided and sank back into my stomach, another cub joined us, her faded brown eyes holding such a strange breed of easygoing confidence that I began to wonder whether Tama had invited her over while I wasn't looking. Seeing as he didn't seem to be bothered by her presence, I assumed he at least wasn't surprised.

"Hey, Afya," he said, and for a moment I was baffled. This wasn't Afya. This couldn't be Afya. Afya was a little yellow speck of fur with hazel eyes and big, scruffy ears, and this was…

A much bigger yellow speck of fur with hazel eyes and big, scruffy ears. And a friendship with Tama. How had I missed that?

"Hey, Tama," she said, before adding with a nod, "…and Amani. You gonna tell everyone tonight?"

"Yeah, I was planning on it," Tama replied. It was as if I had asked the question; he had answered with the air of someone simply confirming something that was already known. Something Afya already knew.

"Wait a second!" I butted in. "You told Afya?"

Afya's brow dipped to match mine. "You told Amani?" she echoed, though with a bit more passion in her voice than I had in mine.

Much more so than he had with Uruzi, Tama looked stymied. "Well, she wanted to help, so I…"

"She wanted to help?" For some reason, Afya looked a good deal more frustrated than I would have expected.

"Yeah, and I guess I…kinda wanted her to help…"

"Are you sure about this, Tama?"

"What, am I sure that I can trust her?"

"Are you?"

"Of course I am."

"But you don't trust me enough to run it by me first."

"Well, it wasn't exactly something I planned out…"

"Gods above, someone tell me what's going on!" I moaned, one of my forepaws stuck fast to the side of my head. After a brief pause, and while ignoring the potent stare of the petite cub beside him, Tama turned to me and began to explain himself.

"A few weeks ago, Afya chased me down out in the grasslands while I was going to see Simba, kind of like you did. Actually, exactly like you did."

"I noticed he was leaving every afternoon, so I followed him out one day," Afya cut in. "Is that what you did, too?"

I nodded, feeling somewhat lightheaded at the whole situation. It was almost eerie hearing such a calm and rational voice come tinkling out of the mouth of a short, slightly dirt-streaked cub that was hardly half my size. And besides that, I was a little embarrassed that that same cub had apparently clued to Tama's behavior at the same time, if not before I had. But at this point, I was ready to just grin and bear it at whatever they chose to tell me…or not tell me, for that matter.

"So anyway, I tried to shake her off…"

"Which didn't work," Afya commented dryly.

"So then I tried to lie to her…"

"Which also didn't work."

"So then I told her about Simba, and then earlier this morning I told her everything I told you, about Scar and the hyenas and all. And then she told me not to tell anyone else until now, because then the secret could get out and the whole thing could be ruined and the sky could fall and Rafiki could grow wings and fly to the moon. And that's why she's glaring at me right now."

"So…is this whole thing her idea?" I asked slowly, my face warming at how confused I was.

"Not really," Tama said, just as Afya said, "Yeah, mostly." After a shared glance with Tama, Afya added, "Well, all the good parts, anyway."

All I could do was nod and try to bludgeon my gaping jaw into something resembling a smile. "So getting back to the point…" Afya continued. "You think now's a good time?"

"Good as any," he agreed, but he didn't make any motion to draw the attention of the rest of the cubs. After a long series of awkward glances between the three of us, Afya piped up again.

"Well?" she said somewhat impatiently.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm going…I'm going…" Tama murmured back, and now, for the first time in my life, I heard Tama gulp. It had never occurred to me that he would be nervous about speaking up in front of a crowd, but there was no mistaking that shuddering curl in his lip or that slight tinge of desperation in his eyes. And somehow, that made me feel better, made me feel closer to him. As if his fear, however small, had made him mortal, and thereby made my own that much more acceptable.

"You'll do great, Tama," I said suddenly, not even thinking about the words until they were echoing in my ears. I saw Afya turn yet another questioning look on me out of the corner of my eye, but now I had no trouble ignoring it. "Everything's gonna be fine."

Whatever mysterious instinct told me to say that was instantly validated by the glow of relief that wash over Tama's face in the moments after. And in that same instant, I understood what my place in our trio was. Afya made the plans and Tama executed them, but I was the one who spurred him to action, who could inspire him to shrug off his anxiety and step up to his chosen role as the single spark that would light the pride ablaze. He was the fire and she was the flint, but I was the bush that would never burn out.

"Thanks, Amani," he whispered back. Beside me, Afya's eyes creased ever so slightly, but I was too busy watching Tama ascend to the slightly raised platform that created a natural border between the inner and outer segments of the Undercroft to waste time worrying about her reaction. From there, he could see every corner and every cub, and from there he would start something that could never be reversed. And to think that as charged with power as the moment was, we three were the only ones that knew of it now. But all that was about to change.

"Could I have everyone's attention, please?" Tama called out, a familiar confidence that I'd heard from him countless times beginning to brew in his voice. Despite that, he seemed a bit surprised when the whole place fell silent in just a few seconds, but he recovered quickly enough. "Okay, thank you. There's something I need to tell you all about, and you probably aren't gonna like it. But it involves all of us." For some reason, he looked back at me before continuing. "And it involves our safety here with Scar."

A muffled buzz of surprise floated through the crowd. Down here, Scar's name was rarely spoken if you could help it. I guess everyone preferred to forget that he existed, just as he had seemingly done with us. He was easier to hate that way.

"We all know why we're down here, and we all know it's the same reason that we're forced to starve while the hyenas take everything for themselves," he said. "It's because of the king, and who he is…or rather, who he isn't. He isn't Mufasa. He isn't Simba. And why? Because they're both…"

"Dead," a silky voice concluded from the outside entrance. "In a tragic accident that could not be prevented."

The bee-like hum of the other cubs ceased in an instant, as if someone had just kicked the hive into a bottomless lake. And though I didn't need to look to know who had smothered such a reaction out of almost two dozen lion cubs, I did anyway. And just as I expected, I saw the brown pelt, black mane, and stone-cold green eyes of the very same king Tama had just been vilifying.

Scar walked forward with a purposeful stride, the air seeming to get colder with every step he took towards the back of the clearing. The other cubs fell away as he passed by them, a few of them sinking down to the ground in either respect or fear. Tama didn't move, and neither did Afya. I could only assume it was because they wanted to show Scar they weren't afraid of him, and not because they were paralyzed with indecision about standing their ground and sprinting for the nearest exit. At least I knew which one I was guilty of.

Scar stopped when he reached the foot of the raised portion of the floor that Tama was on. With the slight differences in altitude, they were at eye level with each other, and they took advantage of this by staring each other down with an almost identical look of calculating calm in their eyes. It was as if each was challenging the other's authority, or maybe just silently saying, "Your move." Eventually, Tama was the first to break.

"Hello, your majesty," he said quietly.

"Hello, Tama," the king replied in turn. "Having a little gathering, are we?"

"Yes, we are. Is that illegal now, too?"

"What were you talking to them about?"

"Being hungry. It's something we all have in common. Makes for good conversation."

I was a bit shocked to hear how forward Tama was being with the king, especially considering the fact that this king would probably kill him without a second thought if Tama rubbed him the wrong way. But on the other hand, what we were planning on doing was far worse than a complaint about hunger, and from the way Scar had looked at Tama before, I guessed that he hadn't been a big fan of his even before now. Maybe he was expecting this sort of reaction from Tama, and all Tama was doing now was working that in his favor. If Scar interpreted his remarks as just a cub's hatred, maybe he wouldn't see the deeper plot lurking beneath the surface.

"Why did you come down here, Scar...sir?" Tama said, correcting himself as he noticed Scar's eyes narrow.

"Oh, nothing much," the king replied, finally looking away from Tama but not dismissing his scowl. "Just a bit of curiosity."

"About what, sir?"

"Well, about you, of course. You see, I hear things up in the den, Tama. Quite interesting things. And one of the things I've heard is that you've attained a certain amount of…notoriety among the hyenas. They say you're the leader down here. They say that makes you a threat."

"Do they now?" Tama said, but his gaze was a little sharper now. I got the feeling he hadn't thought Scar's soldiers even knew his name, and now he was trying to determine what this new information meant for his plan. Nothing good, judging by the look on Afya's face.

"Naturally, I dismissed such talk as nothing but the neuroses of a race raised on paranoia. After all, who would dare try such a thing when rebellion would only lead to bloodshed, and that to needless pain? No, I didn't believe them."

Scar looked at Tama again, who was too late in masking the indignation in his eyes. "But you do, don't you, Tama?"

"Do what, sir?" Tama grunted back.

"Believe," Scar replied with a small shrug. "In their thoughts. In their fears. In rebellion."

The room didn't feel cold anymore, just airless. Scar knew. He knew about the plan, and he knew about Tama, and now there was nothing to stop him from killing us all. Afya and I were as good as dead, and Tama's fate would probably be a hundred times worse. The helpers, the sympathizers would be granted the mercy of a quick death, but Scar wouldn't be so benevolent with their leader. We had all heard of what happened the last time someone tried to rebel, and after being denied his opportunity for true vengeance for so long, there was no telling what kind of torture he'd put Tama through.

But even through my terror, some rational part of my brain managed to make itself heard. Probably the part of my brain that was interested in preventing its own self-liquidification. Scar didn't necessarily know every single detail of Tama's plan; most likely, he didn't even know that there was one. All he knew for sure was that Tama didn't like him and had enough influence over the other cubs to conceivably start a rebellion among them. Maybe this was all just for the purpose of scaring him stiff to keep him from using that influence. Or, considering what Tama had told me was planned for the next morning, maybe he just wanted to have a moment of gloat. Our survival depended on how much Scar had underestimated my best friend. Maybe this could still work.

And strangely, I wasn't even worried anymore. In fact, I was more preoccupied with my own thoughts. Namely, the ones devoted to Tama. Best friend. He was my best friend. My only friend. But when had he become more than that? Did I really think of him as that?

I had just enough time to wonder whether Tama thought of me like that before he spoke again.

"Are you accusing me of something, sir?" he said. I could tell he was trying to sound innocent, and to a certain degree it worked. At the very least, it didn't make things any worse than they already were.

"Well, that's a excellent question, Tama," Scar answered in the same candid tone he'd been using during the whole conversation. "Frankly, I'm not sure myself. You're hardly ever around, I've noticed."

"I like my privacy," Tama countered warily.

"Certainly, certainly. As do I. But what one does when no one is looking often determines their character. Shows their true colors, if you will. And I must say, your colors are starting to paint quite a peculiar picture, Tama."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's no secret that you've a tendency to…disappear. For quite a long time, so I'm told. And often at the same time of day as every disappearance before. It's enough to make anyone a little curious about where you're going. And where you've been."

Tama didn't answer, so Scar kept talking. "Where have you been, Tama?"

"Visiting my dad," he said, effortlessly segueing into his old lie. I guess with all the practice on Afya and I, he'd finally gotten comfortable with it. But it still wasn't enough. Because Scar was smiling long before Tama fell silent again, and a grin from Scar was the same as one from a hyena. It meant he smelled blood, and was ready to take it.

"Oh, is that right?" Scar crooned, his lips pursed in a mocking display of amusement. "So I'm to believe you've been skipping off to Daddy every day for the past few months?"

Tama didn't look like he had an answer, and he wasn't given a chance to try for one. "But isn't it strange that you, all alone, would have to go out to visit _him_? Why, any father of such a strong, noble cub would certainly take it upon himself to visit his only son, wouldn't he?"

For the second time in five minutes, I saw Tama bite his lip and drum his toes against the ground. Somehow, Scar seemed just a little bit taller than him now. "Unless, of course, he was sick. Or wounded." Scar swept his gaze around the awestruck gallery around him before letting it rest on Tama, a cold, almost lethargic fury glistening in his eyes. "Or dead."

Tama's jaw released its hold on his lip, but nothing else moved except for the hissing wind lurking in the shadows of the cavern. Now it was over. Tama was a liar, and more importantly, he was a rebel no matter what he or anyone else could say for him. And yet despite that, someone still spoke up.

"That's because he is dead!"

In the echoing bowels of the Undercroft, it was nearly impossible to tell who the owner of the voice was. Which was good, since the momentary confusion gave me just enough time to realize that it was me.

"He goes out to his grave all the time," I continued. Finally, a few scattered pairs of astonished eyes found me to the left of Tama, Afya's the most comically large of all. "He misses him really bad, so he likes to visit him sometimes and tell him how much he loves him."

Now everyone was looking at me. Including Scar.

"Go on," he intoned, stepping away from Tama to zero in on me. But Tama didn't run for cover or call for help. He just stood still as the stone beneath his paws, for some reason looking even more terrified than he had when the king had been breathing down his neck. Which of course didn't help boost my confidence in the slightest.

I turned back around and found Scar's lanky, filthy, and impossibly tall legs not even a foot away from my nose. Without the benefit of the pedestal in front of the cavern, I wasn't even half the height of the very large and very deadly adult lion that was staring down at me and expecting me to continue saving Tama's life. This really hadn't been one of my better ideas.

I met Scar's eyes and tried to keep talking, whatever foolhardy impulse that had inspired my act of extreme bravery or stupidity—I hadn't decided which yet—now thoroughly purged from my system. "Well, he misses him so much because he…never really got to see him when he was growing up. And he always wanted to meet him and know what he was like." Figuring that my chances of surviving the night would grow the more I spoke, I kept going. "Because he was never there for him."

I didn't realize the depth of my mistake until I saw Scar's teeth clench in time with his paws. But how was I supposed to know that would set him off? This was impossible. How did Tama stay so calm with Scar, while all I could do was try and keep the shuddering in my knees from knocking me clear off my feet?

"Well, I can hardly imagine him sniveling over the same mound of earth for months on end…" Scar grunted. And suddenly, my fear was gone, shunted out of the way by a more powerful emotion. Something of a mix between anger at his insensitivity, even if the feelings he was ridiculing weren't exactly as real as I'd made them seem, and…okay, there was still some fear there too. But it was the lively kind of fear, the kind where your heart is jumping like a jackrabbit in the sun instead of a fish on the lakeshore. So now it kept my lips moving rather than slamming them shut.

"Don't you get it?" I shouted. That was the anger part talking. "Haven't you ever had a family member who died that you wished you could-"

In retrospect, that probably wasn't the best thing to say given the circumstances, but that thought didn't really occur to me at the time. At least, not until my head hit the ground and the noiseless screech inside my head dissipated enough for me to realize that Tama was a furiously spinning blur in the distance and that the sticky wet substance dripping from my nose was blood. I think Scar hit me, but it was a long while before I could decipher any of the shouting match going on behind and around me, let alone figure out whether it had anything to do with me.

For a few seconds, it was high tide in the Undercroft and I was floating helplessly on top of the waves. And then suddenly, everything was in focus again, and Tama and Scar were nose-to-nose, both of them looking once again almost identical in their rage.

"…isn't something that you can just pretend never happened!"

"This is no concern of yours!"

"Well, now you've made it one!"

"_Silence!_"

Maybe it was just the aftereffects of Scar's attack, but I couldn't even tell whose voice was whose until Scar roared for quiet. Now that I could finally get a somewhat clear look at them, I could see the fury and, somewhere far beneath that, pain in the king's eyes. And for some reason, the echoing pulse in my ears weakened just at the sight of that. What _had_ I stupidly stumbled across in the inner trenches of Scar's war-torn mind?

"This is not over," Scar hissed under his breath. "I'll get my answers, and you…you'll be sorry you ever set foot in this kingdom." His words did absolutely nothing to damper the glower in Tama's eyes, and as soon he noticed that Scar made briskly for the exit, without even a single glance in my direction. After a few paces, Afya fell in step behind him, following him all the way to the crack of twilight visible at the edge of the clearing. From the bewitching silence of the other cubs, you would've thought I was dead. I wasn't entirely sure I wasn't, until Scar reached the opening in the rock. The instant his tail slipped fully around the corner, the spell was broken, and as the Undercroft exploded with conversation, Tama bolted straight towards me.

"Amani?" he gushed, all traces of bravado gone now that Scar was out of sight. "Oh, gods, you're bleeding…"

"I'm okay…" I tried to say, but my voice was wobbly and almost incomprehensible to my own ears. If my head hadn't hurt so much, I might have cried.

"No, you're not okay!" he shouted, sending my thoughts into yet another tailspin. "Gods, this is all my fault. I should've checked outside first…"

"Tama, really, it's…" I swallowed back the sudden and dizzying urge to vomit before continuing. "It's not your fault." I smiled, but not all that convincingly. "I guess it was kinda stupid to talk about his family, huh?"

Tama just shook his head and sighed, and my lips dropped again. Now Afya was by his side, and that seemed to calm him down a bit. "How do you feel?" he asked, a bit more composed but no less worried. Or was that panic that lit the fuse of whatever cannon shot him over to me?

"Like I got run over by an elephant," I groaned back.

Tama sighed again, but the next voice to reply wasn't his. "Don't worry, Amani," Tojo reassured me from wherever he had just popped up from, a gallant flair radiating from his every word. There was another cub with him now, a heavyset, yellow-eyed boy whose extra weight looked to be more muscle than fat. Neither of them seemed to be aware of Tama's annoyed glare, and I didn't really have the heart to bring it up. "Scar can't get away with this," Tojo continued, his friend adding an emphatic nod of his own. After a brief pause, he turned to Tama. "He can't, right?"

By now, everyone was looking at Tama again, so if there were ever a time to make an example of me, it was now. But Tama hesitated, and through his eyes I saw his question. He was asking my permission, maybe even asking me to tell him what to do. Maybe he thought I might not want to be the example. Maybe he was worried about me, or maybe he just didn't know if I would be brave enough. But all the doubts I remembered having just a few hours earlier about what we were going to do now seemed cowardly at best, and selfish at worst. My grudge with Scar was personal now…and come to think of it, it always had been. Tama was right: whatever incompetence and whatever private business Scar had brought to the throne, it was our business now. We'd been cooped up under Pride Rock for nine months, and finally I was ready to break out.

I packed all of that into my returning gaze, and that gave Tama all the answer he needed. "No, Tojo, he can't," he finally said, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Scar thinks he can. He thinks he can get away with anything he wants, and why? Because for nine months, we've stood by and let him. We were silent when we should have fought back. He didn't force us down here. We allowed him to shove us away and pretend we were just a bad memory. Pretend that we just disappeared."

Another glance at me, and then Afya. "And if we don't do something by tomorrow morning, he won't have to pretend anymore."

It took a few seconds for the meaning of Tama's words to sink in, but once they did the first vestiges of panic began to sweep through the crowd. But either Tama had pitch-perfect timing or just quick reflexes, because just before the mutterings below him boiled into a frenzy, he spoke up again without hardly raising his voice at all. And everyone listened.

"Tomorrow morning, Scar's going to make an announcement," he said. "He's going to tell the pride that he's decided to exile everyone that isn't of hunting age. That's all of us. And once we're outside the borders, there's no telling what he'll do. He might let us leave and count on us starving to death before a fortnight passes…or he might just send a pack of hyenas after us. I don't know what his plan is, but I do know that whatever it is, I'm not going to let it happen. Because by the time Scar wakes up tomorrow, we'll all already be gone." Another strategic pause, and then: "Tonight, we're breaking out of here."

This time, there was no delay between Tama's proclamation and the crowd's reaction. That is, assuming Tojo could be included as part of the latter group.

"What d'you mean, we're breaking out of here?" he said, his chest deflating a bit. "We're not prisoners…"

"Are we?" Afya commented, boosting her voice with the same projected sense of familiarity that Tama had used to reel in the crowd while still remaining personal with Tojo. "We aren't allowed to go in the den, we technically aren't even supposed to leave the Undercroft, and all we get to eat is what our parents can steal for us. We've been prisoners ever since Scar took over."

"And we've missed the chance to try and get help from another pride without him knowing," Tama continued. "If we wait till tomorrow, there's no telling how many of us would be able to stay together. Or how many of us would survive longer than a day."

Tojo's throat bobbed, and he nodded somewhat meekly. For a moment, it looked as though Tama finally had him convinced to follow him. But if Tojo believed us, it didn't necessarily mean that everyone else did. And after a second of silence, that possibility became a reality.


	3. Part 3

Just a quick note for this one: originally, Parts 2 and 3 were combined into one chapter, and I ended up just splitting the chapter in the best place I could find without really changing the sentence transitions. So if it's been a few days since you read Part 2, I'd suggest reading just the last few lines of that just to get you back into the flow of things for the beginning of this part, which was written with the intention of it following directly after where Part 2 ended with no split whatsoever.

Also: yes, I did bump this chapter up the archive list just now. I've never done that before, and I don't plan on doing it again, but for some reason the alerts system screwed up the first time I posted this chapter, and I wanted to see whether deleting the chapter and reposting it would fix that problem. It did, but the other side effect was that it put my story up at the top of the list, which is kind of a dirty move if you think about it. So I apologize to anyone who is now offended by said dirty move. It shouldn't happen again.

* * *

**The Shadow – Part 3**

**Amani**

The first thing I noticed was his size. He was older than Tama and I, with dark tan fur and a broad chest covered by a tapering clump of brown mane hair, but still not quite an adult. His eyes, two cloudy pinpricks of gray perched behind a rounded muzzle, seemed to be staring at me even as he gazed to my left at Tama. I didn't know why, but for some reason the same feeling of guilty fear that I'd had when Scar showed up returned when I saw him, like he was as much of an overlord as Scar was. Which was strange, because I was pretty sure that I'd never seen him before.

"Or whether there's another way out of this," he said with a surprisingly soft voice. "You'd miss that chance as well."

There was nothing discernibly frightening about him, and yet I still had to suppress a shudder when he spoke. Scar had the same sort of snakelike charm in his voice, but at least with him you knew it was most likely a ruse. I didn't know what to think about this new lion—I couldn't really even call him a cub—and that scared me even more than anything Scar might do to us tomorrow. We could escape from Scar if our plan worked…but if this lion decided to inform Scar of that plan, we were all dead. Or more likely, we were something much, much worse.

"What other way could there possibly be?" Tama said somewhat dismissively. "I don't suppose you think we could just walk up there and ask him to pretty please not exile us, Mr. Royal King, sir…"

"That's exactly what I think we could do," the lion replied without the slightest hesitation. "Should do, as a matter of fact. And if you really cared about the safety of all your friends down there, you would realize that too."

If Tama was shocked by what the lion had said, he did a good job of hiding it. I know I was, and Afya seemed to be fairly taken aback by his suggestion as well. Did he really expect us to go crawling up to Scar and beg him for forgiveness? Did he really expect _me_ to ever set foot near that horrible scorpion without a few hundred pounds and an army on me?

"I'm sorry, I don't think I've introduced myself," the lion continued, while Tama fumed or plotted or whatever was going on behind his solemn and impenetrable eyes. "My name is Kivuli. Most of you probably don't know me, and that's because I've preferred to keep it that way for the last nine months. But I have been watching you, and I have gotten to know a few of you, even if you weren't aware of it at the time. And believe me when I say that, much more so than Tama here, I have your best interests at heart."

He turned and looked at Tama, who still refused or was simply unable to speak. Seemingly satisfied by his opponent's silence, Kivuli faced the crowd again. "I'm sure you all heard Tama's speech a little while ago. I heard it too. And I'm sure you heard him say that Scar didn't care about you, that he was only concerned with power and glory and not about whether you lived or died. But I heard something different. I heard something that I wouldn't have expected from something denouncing Scar. I heard something that I wouldn't want to hear in the voice of my leader. I heard jealousy."

The only noticeable change in Tama's face was a discreet tightening of his jaw. He was furious. I was furious. He had no right to make up lies about Tama, especially when he was using them to make him look worse than Scar! And the worst part was, I still didn't even know why he was doing it. Why was he deliberately trying to destroy our plan, when we would've gladly taken him along with us had Tama been allowed to explain his plan when the moment was ripe? But as I thought about it, I realized that it wasn't really our plan he was trying to destroy; it was Tama's credibility as a leader. But that still didn't answer the most important question of all: _why_?

My head was pounding even worse than before, and my throat was aching to give Kivuli a tongue-lashing he'd never forget, but something held me back. As Kivuli kept talking and Afya kept muttering to herself behind me, I tried to convince myself that that something was the fact that Tama still hadn't spoken up either.

"What does Scar have to gain by exiling you?" Kivuli said, a bit louder than before. "Nothing. He loses his hunters, his warriors, his legacy…it would destroy the future of the pride and tear a rift so large between its current members that he'd never be able to show his face around here again."

He paused for a moment to let that sink in. "And what does Tama have to gain if Scar exiles you? Everything. You run away, you're free of Scar…and then what? Then you're _his_ prisoners. You don't just owe him your gratitude now; you owe your very existence to his plan, to his goodwill. He fills your heads with stories of freedom and victory over tyranny, and all for what? Because he trusts you, Tojo? Because he cares about you any more than an ant queen cares about her workers?"

"Uh…" Tojo stammered, glancing around nervously at all the eyes trained on his suddenly hunched form. "Well, I always thought he was kinda… "

"Nice? Polite? Confident?"

"Well, yeah, actually…"

"And did you ever question his motives?"

"Um…no?"

"Then how do you know what there are?"

"Because I trust him, I guess."

For a moment, Kivuli was without a reply. I don't think he had expected Tojo to say that. "I see," he finally murmured before turning back to Tama. "Well, you've certainly been thorough, Tama. You've got them all convinced that this is a good idea."

"It would appear so," Tama replied icily.

"So you've discussed this with them, I presume? And they all agreed?"

"Well, you're the first objection I've heard."

For just a blink of an eye, a glare simmered out from beneath Kivuli's brow. "I'm aware of that, Tama. You still haven't answered my question."

Tama didn't answer it in the next few seconds either. Eventually, Kivuli continued. "When did you find out about this supposed plan of Scar to exile all of us?"

"This morning," Tama said just before he noticed Afya's shake her head slightly. I guess Kivuli noticed it too, because he was quick to press on his advantage.

"So you've known about this all day…and yet now is the time you choose to tell us? Late in the evening, when there's no time to confirm whether you're even telling the truth?"

"There were other things I needed to take care of…"

Kivuli didn't even bother to try to hide his smile. "I'm sure there were," he chuckled. "Imaginary plots can be complicated."

"I heard it myself. I was in the den when he was talking about it!"

"And did anyone hear this with you?"

"Well, I'm sure a bunch of hyenas did. Feel free to go and ask them."

A few disembodied snickers floated out from the crowd before anyone could see where they had originated. Not that Kivuli didn't try. He realized the fruitlessness of the task fairly quickly, though, and after a moment's pause he returned to the matter at hand. "So you have a plot that only you've heard of, a plan that only you know the full details of…oh, and I almost forgot your secret weapon. Simba, the heir unapparent who's been dead for almost a year." His smile was back. "Forgive me for being slightly skeptical, Tama."

"You're forgiven," Tama intoned back. "Don't let it happen again." There were twice as many snickers this time.

Kivuli closed his eyes for a moment, but didn't betray any frustration he might have had. Slimy and deceitful as he was, he was certainly a stoic debater.

"So glad to hear you're taking this seriously, Tama," he drawled. "I'd hate for the lion promising to save my life to be somber about the subject."

His last sentence effective at silencing both Tama and the crowd behind him, Kivuli only paused for a heartbeat. "I don't think you all realize what you're getting into here," he said, addressing the whole Undercroft now. "Running away because of some fabricated nonsense about being exiled won't solve anything. Scar is not irrational. He knows me, and he knows that I have nothing but the best interests of the pride at heart just as he does. If you go with Tama, I can't protect you from the sun or the rain or starvation, and I certainly can't protect you from the consequences you'll face when Scar catches you. And he will."

Kivuli stepped off to the side, so that there was a noticeable difference of about fifteen feet between he and Tama. "I've said all I need to say," he said. "You can go with Tama and risk death in a hundred different ways…or you can come with me and know the truth about what's really going on in this pride. The choice is yours."

No one moved, except to face Tama one last time. I knew what they were expecting: a fierce rebuttal and reassurance that yes, he knew exactly what he was doing and not a single one of them would catch so much as a cold with him. But yet again, I could see hesitation and doubt clashing together behind his eyes. I had been so worried about whether the rest of the cubs would be suspicious of Tama's credibility that I hadn't even considered whether he might be himself.

_Is this where he needs my help?_, I wondered. _Does he need me to reassure him? _

Can_ I reassure him?_

But at least for the moment I didn't have to figure that out, because just as I was about to speak up, Tama shrugged and gazed back into the crowd, looking more at Tojo than anyone else. "He's right, you know," he said. "You'll be safe if you go with him. If you crawl up to Scar like a slug on a water lily and beg him to spare you, he will. You'll be safe, and you'll never have to worry about me again because Scar will always be there to save you. But do you want to know why he's gonna do that? He's gonna do that because once you give yourself up, he'll know that he has you. He'll know that when you had a choice between freedom and submission, you chose the easy one because you were afraid of what might happen. You chose to give up your morals and leave your heart at the den's door, because you didn't have the courage to stand up to what you knew was wrong."

Everyone's eyes shifted to me for a second or two. Unconsciously, I tried to wipe some of the blood off my nose, but the congealed red smear only cracked and spread farther down my jaw.

"I can't promise you that we'll all live happily ever after. I can't promise you that, because I don't want to lie to you and say that there's a single flawless way for all of us to get out of this. But I can promise you this: I promise you that no matter what happens to us out there, I won't abandon you. Simba won't abandon you. Our strength is in our friendship and our courage and our hope. So yeah, you might survive if you go with Kivuli. But if your idea of living is to eke out an existence under the claws of an unjust king, than I don't think you have the guts to even know the meaning of the word."

By the time he finished, Tama's cheeks had flared into a rosy, flickering pink, and that fire only deepened when it reached his eyes. He was livid with passion, and Kivuli was looking just as confident. And yet still, no one moved. No one was scared enough to go with Kivuli, but no one was inspired enough by Tama's words to take action. No one believed him enough to stand by him.

And that was when I finally realized what he needed my help with. Because I believed him. I had believed him before Afya had chastised him for telling me about the plan, before Scar had smacked me halfway senseless, before Kivuli had crept out from the woodworks and tried to stop our escape before it even began. I had believed him right from the beginning, when he looked in the eyes and placed his nose next to my ear and gave me the wings to fly up and away and out of this place. I was me because of him. I could be free because of him.

So really, how hard could it be to give the other cubs a few feathers of their own?

In my mind, my idea was fairly simple: take a couple steps forward, say that I believed Tama, and then go stand by him. Maybe toss a glare in Kivuli's direction if the notion struck me. Easy-peezy. But my legs apparently weren't in on that plan, because before I knew it I was up on the platform with Tama and standing right at the edge, exactly where he had stood when he had faced down Scar just a few minutes before. My mouth wasn't feeling too agreeable either, because when I started talking the words that came out weren't the ones being sent down from my brain.

"I just have one thing to say," I said, my paws shaking with something I didn't quite have the composure to identify at the time. "Ever since we came down here, Tama's done nothing but help all of us. Every day, he's out from dawn to dusk trying to keep us alive and well, and not once has he ever said no to anything we asked him to do. He's eaten with us, slept with us, lived with us, and if we needed him to I know for sure that he would die for us. So I don't know who the _heck_ you think you are, Kivuli, to creep out from whatever hole you've been hiding in the last nine months and say that he doesn't care about us. Where were you when the hyenas took over the watering hole and Tama spent two days searching every inch of the grasslands for another one? Where were you when we were hungry and scared and injured and alone? Where were you? Where was Scar? I'll tell you where you two were: you were sitting up in the den, stuffing yourself with all the meat that Kafala and Haja and Bahari should've had. You spent all this time sucking up to Scar, and while Tama worked himself to exhaustion for the sake of everyone else in here, all you thought about was yourself."

The sight of Kivuli's slightly dumbstruck look, slight though it may have been, gave me just enough of a shot in the heart to finish with a bang. "I'm going with Tama," I said. "And if any of you thought for just one second about what he's done for you, you won't have to think at all about what the right choice is."

I meant to walk purposefully over to Tama with my chest thrust out and my head high, but somewhere along the way my self-satisfaction petered out and my pace slowed to a somewhat spastic shuffle. It also didn't help that I tripped over the edge of the platform and just about smashed my face into Tama's chest. But nevertheless, my speech seemed to have done the trick. Afya was by Tama's side quickly enough to help me up, and slowly but surely more and more cubs began to sidle over as well. And I guess as places to fall flat on my face went, Tama's chest wasn't such a bad spot. It meant I was the closest to him out of everyone, and it meant I had a perfect view of the curvature of his jaw and the underside of his neck and the glassy, almost radiant look of unbridled gratitude gushing from his eyes with such force that I could feel it spilling down the back of my neck and into my legs. In fact, aside from the splotchy mess that was my nose and the fact that for some reason I was suddenly as dizzy as a dodo bird, it was just about as close to a perfect moment as I could remember.

Not everyone went with us, which I guess was to be expected. Kivuli must have had a few friends beforehand, and the cubs that were standing by him—four of them, all about the same age as Kivuli—looked like they could've fit the bill. None of them looked very enthusiastic about their choice, though, except for a lanky one with a thick brown tuft over golden fur and red eyes that seemed to be smiling just as maliciously as the rest of his face. All in all, it looked like there were almost twice as many bodies with us as there were with Kivuli, and that was enough to get a smile out of me. But though some measure of relief was clear on Tama's face, his shoulders were still coiled tight, and not a single hair on the back of his neck had dropped a millimeter. After everything that had happened tonight, he probably wouldn't fully relax until we had a hundred miles between us and Pride Rock. If he ever did at all.

"It seems they do trust you, Tama," Kivuli said, and the significant lack of any concern over his defeat was what finally got my own hackles rising. Sure, we hadwon the battle, but the war would be over in a heartbeat if Kivuli told Scar about our plan. But as I realized that, another nagging thought jogged a second lap around my brain: why hadn't he just done that to begin with? What was the point of all this?

"If you're going to tell Scar, I hope you're ready for a fight," Tama replied, giving the one answer I had somewhat hoped I wouldn't hear. It was the right one to give, of course, but that didn't mean I had to look forward to trading blows with a quintet of nearly full-grown lions and lionesses, especially when the red-eyed one looked like he might go ahead and take a few shots at us no matter what Kivuli decided to do. But it looked to me like Kivuli didn't want a fight any more than I did. They might be bigger, but we had the advantage in numbers, and judging by the expressions on the faces on the two nearly identical adolescent lionesses and the lithe, slightly insubstantial-looking brown-maned lion standing next to them, Kivuli might only have himself and the red-eyed lion to fight with.

Evidently, Kivuli didn't feel like pressing his luck, because he was quick to dissuade Tama from making good on his threat. "I don't think that'll be necessary," he grumbled, finally betraying a bit of his annoyance at the fruits of his labors, at least two of which seemed to not be entirely aware that there was a confrontation going on in front of them.

"Good," Tama said forcefully. "Then get out."

I thought that was a bit bold of him to say, but Kivuli didn't protest. With his red-eyed friend leering back at us and the rest of his group following aimlessly behind, Kivuli finally turned away and disappeared into the humming night air outside, sulking the whole way out. Once he was gone, Tama took a deep breath, squeezed his eyes shut, and with every soul in the Undercroft watching, swore.

"I thought it went pretty well, all things considered," Afya remarked a bit dryly as Tama ground the knuckles on his front paw against his temple.

"But what was it?" I asked to no one in particular, not really sure who the right person to ask was. Whatever hopes I'd had that Kivuli's final actions would reveal his motives obviously weren't going to pan out. "I mean, what was the point of all that?"

"It was a power play," Tama said, somehow crushing his eyelids together with even more force than before. "I should've seen it coming. He probably knew about tomorrow just as much as I did."

Somehow, it was incredibly satisfying to hear Afya say, "What?" at the same time as me. At least I knew she was mortal now.

"Kivuli thinks he's next in line for the throne," Tama explained. "And technically, he is. So when he heard me break the news about tomorrow, he probably thought he could swoop in and steal a dozen followers before they even had half a clue what was going on. He probably thought that would impress Scar." A grim smile peeked out from behind his paw toes. "Lucky for us, Scar can't stand him either."

"So is he going to tell Scar?"

"He'll probably try. But, like I said, Scar hates Kivuli. With just his old friends to support him, Scar won't take him seriously even if he does tell him. And we're damn lucky he won't, because the only reason I'm even alive right now is because Scar doesn't think we're worth the effort to spit on."

I came so close to saying, "But what if Scar does believe him?" that my lips were already pursed for the first word when I bit my tongue and swallowed it back again. The last thing Tama needed was for me to voice all the fears I'd kept pent up inside me this whole time, especially when most of the other cubs with us probably had many of the same ones. The least I could do was wait until a fully appropriate opportunity to panic presented itself.

To distract myself, I took a cursory glance over the other members of our party. Most of them I recognized as cubs I'd seen in and around the nursery when I'd been in there; unfortunately, that included Uruzi. It also included a quite large and quite rugged-looking cub with fur so dark that his nearly indiscernible back half seemed to be just another swirl in the shadows probing outwards from the corners of the clearing. I didn't think I was imagining the dangerously vicious look in his eyes, nor the far too numerous moments when that look seemed to be focused on me.

"So what now?" Tojo asked, giving voice to the question I had been hoping not to be the first one to ask.

"We wait for Nala to come back from her First Hunt," Tama answered. "Once she's here, we'll go meet Simba and be across the river before anyone even realizes we're gone."

"I thought the hunt thingy wasn't supposed to end until tomorrow?"

"Change of plans. She's coming with us."

Tojo readily accepted this new development; I guess he really did trust Tama implicitly. In any case, in lieu of any further questions, we all settled down to wait for Nala's arrival.

By the time fifteen minutes had passed, I was getting bored. By the time thirty minutes had passed, I was getting a little nervous. And by the time two hours had passed and the lone blocky oval of moonlight laid out at the bottom of the exit of the clearing was the only thing keeping us from blindly running into each other, Tama was about ready to explode.

"Where is she?" he muttered much louder than I think he realized. "Simba's not gonna leave if she's not with us!"

"When did you last see her?" Afya practically spat. The combination of the stresses of the evening, Tama's incessant grumblings, and what I could only assume was a characteristic lack of patience had snowballed into a dense cloud of irritability that was slowly starting to catch hold of everyone else in the Undercroft.

"This afternoon, when she was already coming back!" he shouted. He cursed for the second time that night under his breath, then added with a groan, "She knew the plan, and her mom wouldn't have let them get lost for this long. Something must have gone wrong."

"You don't know that, Tama," I said in a small voice. Perhaps predictably, it didn't do much in the way of reassuring him.

"Yeah, I know we don't _know_ anything, but…for the sake of being prepared, let's just assume something did happen," he said, countering Afya's incensed glare with a desperate air of utter exhaustion. "We could split up and see if we can't track her from where I saw her earlier…"

"What if Scar has her?"

It was Tojo again. Of course. How did he always materialize whenever there was the slightest hint of trouble brewing? Did he just not know what else to do with himself?

As Tama's face took on a grayish pallor and Afya gritted her teeth, Tojo began to realize what he'd said. "I mean, I don't know that that's it, I just…thought of it all of a sudden and I figured I might as well throw it out there…"

"No, you're probably right," Tama sighed, once again forcing his eyes closed with a forepaw clamped to his brow. "Gods above, how the hell are we supposed to get her out of there?"

"Well, Amani had a point. We don't know anything for sure right now," Afya observed, finally seeming to loosen up a bit. "Maybe one of us should go check."

"I'll go," Tama said, neither giving any else an opportunity to volunteer nor giving any indication that that wasn't exactly what he had intended to do. "I'll check around the back where I went earlier. All of you stay here, and if something goes wrong, Afya will take you all out to the river caves and get a new plan going from there."

He was gone before I could wrestle my thoughts into submission long enough to mold one of them into a question about exactly what "wrong" entailed. But even while he was there, I was pretty sure he wouldn't have stopped even if I had spoken, and he certainly wouldn't have let someone else take his place. Preferably, someone whose life I wasn't particularly dependent on for things like inspiration, protection, a will to keep calm and carry on instead of following my gut instinct to sprint for the sunrise like the night would swallow me alive. Things like that. But I got the feeling that he didn't even trust anyone else enough to go. Or did he just want to protect us? Was he so used to shouldering all the burdens meant for us that he couldn't walk straight without them? Was his back so crooked and deformed with the worries of half a pride that he couldn't remember what it was like to have worries of his own?

There was no way to be sure. And anyway, it was too late to worry about why this thing had happened. Now was the time to start worrying about what was going to happen because it happened. And wouldn't you know it, just when I thought the gods might actually make me figure out the identity of "what" on my own, they went ahead and gave it a body and a face and a sour, vitriol-filled, and yet somehow slightly alluring voice.

"He's a doll, isn't he?" Uruzi said nonchalantly, her face about two inches from mine. I hadn't even noticed her walk up, and as I looked over at her I couldn't imagine how I had managed that. The pervasive aroma of wildflowers practically steaming from her fur was so strong that it seemed like there was a patch of them growing right beneath her chin. I really needed to work on this whole spatial awareness thing.

"Um…I don't…" Add to that list of future interpersonal improvements: quick, coherent responses.

"Mm-hmm. Awesome," Uruzi sighed with an exaggerated swing of her head in my direction. "Okay, you and I both know I don't care one way or the other, so why don't we just cut to the chase, shall we?"

"Uh…"

"Wonderful. So, you like Tama, is that fair to say?" I managed enough of a nod to make it recognizable as one. "Yeah, I figured. And that's all fine and good, but I just want to make one thing very, very clear, okay?"

I blinked. When had her eyes turned to stone?

"Tama. Is. Mine. Understood?" she said. "Oh, don't give me that look like you don't know what I'm talking about. Your eyes glass over every time he coughs up a hairball."

I could've tried to explain myself, tried to explain that it was just jealousy, just a mistake, and I didn't really even _like_ him anyway. But there wasn't a liar deplorable enough in the whole world to deny what she'd said. My face was so hot it felt almost leathery, and part of me wished for all the world that it could happen exactly like that, that my skin would simply sizzle and pop until I just evaporated into thin air and escaped from the horrible, magnificent truth that yes, oh gods above yes, it was true, it was all true and Uruzi knew it. And she hated me for it.

"Aw, it hurts, doesn't it?" she cooed as I kept a shaky eye on the patch of rock between my paws. "Well, I'll make you a deal, okay? The rest of the pride? They're all yours. Pick any one you want. I'll even put in a good word for you. What d'you say, sweetheart?"

Now it hit me: I had never escaped the nursery after all. It was right here, clawing its way through my chest with those fluttering lashes and that lustrous fur and those horrible, flawless, gleaming teeth, smirking with the knowledge that they could bite my head clean enough if ever they had the urge, and I would be powerless. I would be small. Always small. Always the shadow of those better than me.

"Hey, pipsqueak, you hear me? I'm trying to be nice here. I don't do that for everyone, y'know. What, are you scared of me? Are you afwaid of big, bad Uruzi?" She leaned forward with a simpering grin. The instant her claws pinched the crest of my chin, I snapped.

"Go away!" I squealed, feebly batting at her foreleg with a paw that was quivering so badly I almost missed it entirely. And that was it. One squeak from the field mouse, and the lioness smacked it away, her paw daintily returning to her side as thought the act of shoving me to the ground had sullied it beyond repair.

"So that's the way you want to play it, huh?" she snarled. "Go ahead, try that again, you little brat! Maybe if you aren't such an uppity little bitch about it this time, I might even forget to tell Tama that you attacked me without so much as the slightest provocation. Go on, try it! Take another swing at me, and it'll be the last time you ever use that paw!"

I cringed further towards the ground with every shout, my eyes filling with tears as the sound reverberated and devolved into my own voice. _Stop it! Don't let her you do this to you! Fight back, damnit!_ I couldn't even trust my own thoughts anymore. They were on Uruzi's side too.

I only whimpered once, but Uruzi gave such an eyeroll that I had to think back and wonder just how big that sound had really been. And then, without warning, she was glaring again. Except this time, not at me.

"Thought I heard her ask you to go away," a sharp, powerful voice that sounded like it belonged to someone with muscles in places I didn't even have. And yet, there was something almost…playful to it. He sounded angry, but at the same time he seemed to be enjoying the fact that he was angry.

"Brilliant deduction, Usiku," Uruzi grumbled, though I noticed she tempered her tongue much more so than she had with me. "And since when have you cared about defending the weak and the helpless?"

"Since I stopped being one of them myself," Usiku replied. "Now scram."

"And I suppose you'll pick me up by the neck and throw me halfway to the watering hole if I don't, right, macho boy?"

"Well, since you asked, my backup plan was more along the lines of shaving you in a few very strategic places, but I'm flexible."

Huh. She actually looked scared now. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Very, _very _strategic places."

Uruzi swallowed hard and did a poor job of passing it off as the buildup to a cough. "Well, what the hell do I care…" she muttered as she stalked off. "She's yours, ya lunatic."

"Love you too, Uruzi."

Finally, my eyes cleared enough to get a good look at my savior, only to well up ahead when I saw who was standing above me. It was the giant frightful specter of a cub I'd seen tucked away in the shadows earlier, the one who had glared at me and sent a foreboding shiver washing all the way down to the cracks between my toes. What could he possibly want with me?

He picked up on the state I was in just as quickly as Uruzi, but his reaction came as a total shock. "Oh, crap. I…I'm sorry," he mumbled, looking thoroughly confused and…afraid? "What did I do?"

It took me a few tries to get the first word out, but after that the rest of them came easily. "Y…you saved me," I said. "I mean, you got her to go away…"

"And that was good, right?" _What?_ "I mean, did you want me to do that?"

"Uh…yeah. Of course. I guess."

Usiku caught his bottom lip between his teeth for a second and then blew out a sigh, his lips vibrating like a zebra's. "Okay, then," he said. "Gods, I suck at this…"

"No, you…you did fine," I replied, completely clueless on what he was talking about and why I was trying to reassure him about it. "Really. Thank you."

Usiku stared at me for a moment, and then laughed. And I giggled right along with him. For such a somber-looking lion, his laugh was as infectious as a hyena's cackle, but without the inherent threat of death and dismemberment. That was what he kind of looked like, I thought: a friendly hyena. Broad in the shoulders, fur a mystifying shade of dark brown, and the trappings of his black mane more of an offshoot of the rest of his pelt than a legitimate signal of lionhood. And when he smiled, his fur seemed to ratchet up a few shades and the Undercroft seemed a bit less dreary and depressing. I couldn't fathom why he didn't use it more often, or why I hadn't noticed him if he had.

"So you're okay, then?" he finally asked.

"Yeah, I'm okay," I answered back, coughing up another uncontrollable giggle when I saw Uruzi sulking in the corner obsessively grooming the fur lining her jaw. "That was really brave of you to do that for me."

"Not really," he started to say, but halfway through he changed tone completely and began to emote with an even more radiant air of good cheer. "But yeah, if you think it was, then…yeah. Thank you too. I guess. Damnit." He sighed again and smiled with half his mouth. "Is it obvious I don't have a clue what I'm doing?"

"Yeah," I said with a smile of my own. "But I don't mind. I'm glad you came, Usiku."

He gave me a strange look when I said that, but I got the feeling that it was because I had said something incredibly important to him, more than I had realized. But putting his current jovial attitude aside, it quickly became clear that he was usually much better at hiding his emotions, entirely unlike me. So all he ended up doing was muttering a quick thanks and turning around to walk back towards another cub with shockingly white fur, eyes the color of hay, and a faint pink scar just barely visible on her cheek. I knew Jua well enough, but I didn't have a clue when she had started hanging around with Usiku, or why she was smiling and nodding in approval when he met her eyes and shrugged as if to say, "Well, I tried." Maybe he had just been friendly to her like he had been with me. I made a mental note to ask Tama about it later.

Or perhaps even sooner than that. A few minutes after Usiku left, Tama jogged back into the Undercroft, his chest heaving and iron in his eyes.

"So…" Afya began to say.

"He's got her," Tama puffed out. "I don't know how, but he's got her in the den with half his army watching, and he's grilling her like a war criminal. He knows something's up."

"Is she all right?" I asked, a bit surprised at being the first to ask that question. Since when had I had such a motherly instinct? And since when had it felt so much like the natural thing to do, as if this were just my part in the play alongside Afya's brains and Tama's courage?

"Well, she doesn't look hurt," Tama said. "And she knows how important all this is, so I don't think she'll crack easily. She's tougher than that. But if she doesn't give in, Scar's patience will sooner or later. And I really don't want to be anywhere near here when that happens."

"So what do we do?" I asked. And that was something occurred to me: we. Even before Scar and Kivuli had come into the picture, me, Tama, and everyone else coming with us was already "we". What would "we" do, now that "we" were all together in this? Who was "we"? I still didn't know. I had hardly gotten thirty seconds to glance over the crowd before Tama left and Uruzi decided to grace me with her omnipotence. But now even that seemed unimportant at best. For lack of anything better, we were all family now, and I was ready to accept that. We would all be our own fathers and mothers wherever we were going. And Uruzi would be the stuffy, overly critical great aunt. With the wrinkly gray nose and the reedy voice that smelled of stale blood and molting lilacs and musty old age.

Yeah. She'd be great at that.

"Well, it's almost midnight, so Simba will be here soon. I guess I'm gonna have to tell him what's happened. I'll let him make the call about Nala." He turned to Afya, his eyes passing over me in the process. "You're up again. Just keep 'em ready to run if we need to."

"Wait, we're going now?" Tojo asked. "What about my mom? Can't I just tell her where I'm going?"

An icy murmur of agreement crackled through what was left of the original crowd, and my wishful thoughts of Uruzi with drooping jowls and a beauty mark on her cheek big enough to glow in the dark shattered into a thousand needles pricking at my heart. All this time I'd been obsessed with thinking about my new "family", and I'd completely forgotten about the one I already had. How could I leave now? How could I leave my mother here with Scar? How could I leave her without any way for her to know that I was all right, that I was safe, that I still loved her and I hadn't run away and I was sorry for breaking her heart and taking away the last thing she cared about in this world. My face was livid again, and this time my shame was egged on by disgust. How could I have been so eager to disappear, so eager to run off with Tama into the wild beyond the wild?

But was that it? Was it just Tama that made me jump into this without a second of hesitation? Would I follow him to hell and back because it was the right thing to do, or because Uruzi was right? Did it even matter whether Uruzi was right, or whether I wanted her to be right?

I couldn't even begin to decide. And as it turned out, I didn't have much time to try. "Look, Tojo, I don't want to go right out and say you can't, but right now I don't really know how this is going to work," Tama said, with a brutal honesty to his words that I knew wasn't at all planned to earn him trust or respect. "All I know is that I'm gonna go talk to Simba about all this, and we're going to figure out how to get all of us safely out of here. That's my biggest priority right now." He paused for a moment, then continued trying to peel the deepening frown off Tojo's face. "Gods, I know this sucks right now, and I'm sorry. I don't want to leave my mom behind any more than you do, but we'd be risking a hell of a lot if any more of us went up there right now. I just don't think it'd be a good idea."

Tojo still looked depressed and I still felt sick to my stomach, and I guess Tama took that as a sign that he hadn't done quite enough to fix things just yet. "Hey, listen," he said. "If we get a chance, Simba and I will talk to someone and make sure they spread the word about where we're going. Okay?"

Tojo nodded and put on a faint smile, and Tama left again with a bit less of a sag in his shoulders. I still wasn't happy with myself or really even with Tama, but there was enough rationality edging back into my view to send my opinion on the matter flying up in the air again. Once again, the right decision was just one of a hundred mosquitoes buzzing around me, indiscernible among its brethren and whizzing by too fast for me to get a good look at it anyhow. For now, I finally decided to just be content with swatting them away and figuring out how badly I'd screwed up later.

"I wonder what Simba's going to do…" I wondered aloud, more to take my mind off myself than anything.

"Who knows?" Tojo answered immediately, seemingly unaware of the fact that Afya's bulging cheeks and suddenly simmering glare suggested that she might be the only one who did. "But Tama's smart, and I bet Simba is too. I'm sure they'll come up with a good plan."

To make a short story shorter, they didn't.

"Whaddya mean, _he didn't tell you where he was going?_" Tojo sputtered the instant Tama had finished explaining what little he knew about what had just happened outside the Undercroft. He'd only been gone five minutes, so whatever meeting he'd had with Simba must've been brief. "You said you guys were gonna figure this whole thing out together!"

"Well, apparently he didn't take that into account when he decided to go take on a whole freaking _army_ all by himself!" Tama grumbled a bit rudely. Though in retrospect, I can't imagine how he was even still coherent at that point after everything that happened that night.

Afya, who had been deep in thought for a couple minutes, was the next to speak up. "You're sure he said that he was going to do the only thing that would get Scar's attention?" she asked.

"Yeah, pretty damn," Tama growled. "Care to interpret that for us?"

Afya gave a non-committal shrug, and then I guess she started to think aloud, because I couldn't make heads or tails out of what she said next. "Well," she pontificated. "Scar gained control of the Pridelands through what amounts to a military takeover, rather than slowly decentralizing the kingdom and gradually diverting regional political power to himself. So he obviously values strength more than intellectual ability, despite the fact that his lack of physical aptitude would suggest otherwise. Also, the only thing that ever seems to catch him off guard is when someone challenges his authority, and aside from that he's a bit of a control freak as well. So from that, we can assume that his greatest fear is losing his dominance over the Pridelands. And since the only thing a king can directly control without any outside influence is his subjects, the only way to effectively undermine that control is to make his subjects publically disrespect his authority." She paused for a moment and looked around, her tone suggesting that the topic at hand couldn't possibly be simpler. "And of course, the easiest way to do that is through recalcitrant rebellion," she concluded a moment later, stepping back to allow us to make our counterpoints. I made a mental note to get back to her on that once I'd employed the services of a translator to spin some sense from her words and a shaman to do something about my throbbing headache. Judging by the looks on everyone else's faces, it looked like that shaman would have his work cut out for him, and judging by the look on Afya's face, I had a feeling she was fully aware of that and more than a little amused by it.

Tojo's friend Tani looked the most confused out of all of us. "Um…could you repeat the part about Scar and the subjects and…" He blinked. "What does 'recalcitrant' mean?"

While everyone else seconded Tani's question, Tama gritted his teeth and glared at Afya, to which she replied with a perfectly adorable innocent-little-girl grin. "So when you say all that, you really mean what exactly?" he asked.

Afya shrugged again. "Simba's gonna start a riot," she replied.

"And you couldn't have just said that at the beginning because…" Tojo said back in something close to a mutter.

"Okay, can we pause for just a sec here?" Tama interrupted, his glare still zeroed in on Afya. "I'm sure that was an absolutely wonderful analysis of Scar's inner personality, but do you really think that Simba would do something that stupid?"

"It wouldn't be stupid," Afya countered, still utterly unfazed. She was thoroughly enjoying this, and a little bit too much if you ask me. "It'd be a pretty good plan, actually. What with Scar and the hyenas occupied with maintaining order, we'd have to set ourselves on fire for him to notice us. We could just walk right out of here."

"Well, I'm glad you have so much faith in uncontrolled mayhem," Tama said in a simpering, bitingly sarcastic tone that I couldn't help but laugh at. Quietly. "I, on the other hand, don't as much, and neither does Simba. So let me just set the record straight right now and say that Simba is not and will never be dumb enough to try and start a…"

Before Tama could finish, all our eyes were drawn upward by a loud conversation bouncing down from the promontory directly above us. The voices were too muffled to make out what they were saying or whom they belonged to, but it was apparent enough from the tones of their echoes that they weren't happy with one another. The voices persisted for a bit, gradually getting louder and more incensed, until finally an angry roar cut through the Undercroft, loud enough to repeat itself half a dozen times in the enclosed space. A few seconds later, the only thing I could hear coming from the promontory were the sounds of snarling lionesses and yipping hyenas. In the cramped, echoing Undercroft, it sounded as if the fight was happening all around us, and we were stuck in the very center. And there was no doubt in my mind that it was a fight. A huge one.

As screams rent the air and dust sprinkled down from the ceiling, I looked back down at everyone else. Most of the other cubs were still staring up into the showers of sand floating down from the palate of Pride Rock, except for Afya, who was looking at Tama with a self-satisfied smirk prancing across her lips, and Tama, who was looking at a nearby rock the size of his paw with a slightly unnerving amount of concentration.

"He just started a riot, didn't he?" Tama stated in a monotone.

"Sure sounds like it," Afya confirmed with a nod. Tama continued to stare at the rock, his expression indicating that he was giving serious thought to snatching it up and crushing it between his teeth.

"So what was that you were saying about Sim…" Afya started to say.

"All right_, fine_!" Tama shouted. "You were right, I was wrong, Simba's insane. Let's just get out of here while we can before I get my bearings and go rip his head off."

Damnit, I was laughing again. This was not a laughing matter. "What about Nala?" I managed to ask with a mostly straight face as Tama began to stomp towards the exit. "Shouldn't we try to help get her out?"

"We'd just be in the way," Tama answered quickly. "And besides, I'm sure Simba's got another foolproof plan that he conveniently forgot to tell me about. No freakin' worries…"

Before I could bite my tongue hard enough to get another question out, Tama was outside and getting steadily farther away ever second. It didn't take long for us to realize that he was going to leave Pride Rock with or without us at this point, and after a couple minutes we caught up with him about a quarter mile away from Pride Rock. Afya had been right: what with the mayhem going on outside the den, not a single creature, lion or hyena, even looked our way as we filed out of the Undercroft and into the grasslands. Escaping was easier than I ever would've anticipated, so much so that I couldn't help but feel a bit embarrassed that we hadn't ever tried this sort of thing before now.

The sounds of the fight had faded away by the time the stone monolith was half a mile away, but I couldn't tell whether it was just the distance or whether Simba's impromptu rebellion had already been quelled. I'm guessing it was the latter, since the land was flat and no one had spoken a word for the last fifteen minutes. We didn't say much for the next forty-five either, and by the time we finally reached the river caves Tama had mentioned before, for the first time in my life I was actually eager for a conversation—_any_ conversation—to start up. But the other cubs didn't seem as fidgety as I at the prolonged silence, and once we reached the caves themselves everyone was quick to pile into the main cavern, a massive, blackened crevice that seemed to dip right down into the shallow, meandering river about ten feet away.

The rest of the clearing was fairly sparse. A few wave-smoothed rocks gave the shoreline a hint of character, and a spindly-looking tree guarded the northern entrance to the clearing outside the caves. Behind the woody web of tangled branches and scratchy leaves, I could just barely see the distant outline of Pride Rock. If Simba really had been living here for almost nine months, he certainly hadn't devoted much of his time to sprucing the place up. But then again, when you can still see your old home that you can never return to in the corner of your eye at every hour of the day, you probably wouldn't think of homely touches as something desirable to spend your time on. And I guess it wasn't like he would have ever been expecting any visitors aside from Tama.

Speaking of whom, Tama seemed to be the only one that hadn't slunk off to the relative safety of the cave. As the moon constantly flickered in and out between the overhanging clouds, he kept his eyes trained on Pride Rock, not even bothering to look back at the rest of his followers.

His followers. In an instant, the thought was stuck fast to my brain. Tama was our leader now. Whatever happened to us, it would be attributed to his genius or his incompetency, just as Kivuli had said. But hadn't we always done that? Hadn't we always looked to him to fix everything, to mend our souls and give us hope where it didn't belong? Did he realize that all of that would only be bigger and harsher and more important that ever, now that his leadership was what got us safely out of Pride Rock?

Of course he did. He was too smart not to. So the next burr to fasten itself to the inside of my skull was this: could he handle so much responsibility? Did he even ever want it at all?

I had always assumed he had. I had always assumed that being the leader was just someone he was naturally inclined to do. In my mind, Simba had once been the future king in blood-right, but Tama was now the leader in spirit. It made things easier when I thought of him like that. Made it easier to like him, respect him. Admire him.

But what had tonight shown that would support that? Nothing. He was brave, he was kind, and he was so determined to get us all out safely, but he wasn't a leader. His blood didn't burn with the fiery lust for the influence and immortality of a monarch. The respect he got was not the friendship he wished for. All he wanted to do was help, and all through tonight I had seen him gradually crumble under the expectations of nine months coming to a head. There was Tama, the fearless warrior, and here was Tama, the well-spoken lion cub who would serve every other creature on earth before himself and shared a bond with me that defied description from either of us. And maybe all this time, I'd been looking for the false Tama because I was scared of what might happen to me. Because I wanted him to save me. But now I had one last question for myself, one that I wasn't sure I wanted answered. One that Uruzi had asked earlier, and I still hadn't fully comprehended yet.

Which Tama was I in love with? The powerful one that I could call my savior, or the caring one that I could call my friend?

Tama stayed outside the cave for thirty minutes, and I stayed out with him. We never looked each other's way. We never spoke. I never told him what I was thinking about.

At the end of those thirty minutes, I heard a slight sigh come from Tama's direction. "I don't think they're coming back tonight," he said blearily, his weakly smile betraying his momentary loss of faith.

"Maybe they just got held up somewhere," I suggested. But even I wasn't convinced that my words had any truth to them.

"Maybe," he sighed back. Something that felt like a full-grown coconut dropped into my belly.

"Well, Simba's smart, isn't he?" I offered up. "And he wouldn't let anything happen to Nala, right?"

"He's instinctive," Tama replied. "He has this ability to always know what to do and how to do it, and I just…"

My stomach turned again. "Just what?"

Another sigh, this one even more melancholy. "I just fake it really well," he murmured. "All night tonight, I was scared out of my mind, and all I could do was just try not to show it. And then when you were the first one to stand up for me…"

The change was instantaneous. At the same time as my heart galloped into my ears, Tama's paws clenched and his throat bobbed. For a long while, we just stared at each other.

"I…I never thanked you for that, did I?" he said quietly some time later.

"I saw it in your eyes," I answered. "I figured that was what you meant to say."

Tama's eyes bounced from his twitching claws back up to me, then darted back down beneath his feet again. "Well, anyway, I guess I should go ahead and say it now."

Now he was looking me in the eyes again.

"Thank you, Amani," he said. "You were unbelievable back there. I don't think I could've made it through tonight without you."

Well, that was that. There wasn't any way I would be in any condition to speak for the next few hours. Or days.

Something must've bumbled out of my mouth that resembled speech, though, because the next thing Tama did was smile. "No, really," he said. "When you stood up to Kivuli, that was…that was one of the bravest things I've ever seen."

_Well, that's just lovely of you to say that, Tama. Now, why don't you run along to bed so you don't have to watch me bite my own tongue in half, hmm?_

I don't think Tama understood my garbled attempt at coherence this time, but he didn't seem too fazed by it. "You should get some sleep," he said with a touch of tenderness that I really hoped I wasn't imagining. "The sun'll be up in a few hours."

"Are you gonna come to bed too?" I asked, without ever bothering to ask myself what the hell kind of question that was. Why was I asking him if he was coming to bed too? Did I expect him to come sleep beside me every night of every…

"I think I'll gonna wait out here for a little while," he said. And then he grinned. "Simba's probably on his way back right now."

I smiled back, nodded, and managed to walk in a mostly straight line all the way into the somewhat crowded cave, where I lied down against the wall and spent about fifteen more minutes trying to guess whether my stomach or my brain would stop churning first. I guess it must've been my brain in the end, because in two blinks' time the moon had switched places with the bright, blinding rays of the morning sun and the air was sloshing through the cave with the saturated scent of morning.

I didn't feel all that well-rested, but with the light of the newborn day shining right in my eyes I didn't expect that trying to go back to sleep would get me anywhere. And besides, by the time I stood up and got the obligatory stretch-and-yawn routine out of the way, I had noticed that Tama was conspicuously absent from the cave. In fact, he was still outside the cave, and he was either comatose out there or had simply collapsed from exhaustion at some point during the night. Judging by the way his paws were tangled up in each other and his jaw was hanging open in an unbroken snore, I guessed it was the latter.

I padded out to him as quietly as my stiff and stumpy paws would allow me. "Tama?" I whispered. He didn't respond, so I prodded him in the side with a paw. Then in the head. Then in the side again. Either Tama was a heavy sleeper or we were going to need to start scheduling a funeral.

Finally, I received a throaty grunt for my troubles. With a bleary-eyed glance towards my offending paw, Tama came to, and almost immediately his glance widened into a stare.

"Are they back yet?" he asked desperately, half springing, half stumbling to his feet. "What time is it?"

_Well, good morning to you too, Tama._

"It's dawn," I said, not feeling nearly as cordial towards him as I had the night before. "The sun's probably been up for an hour."

"Oh, gods above…" he moaned. "They're not back yet!"

"Who isn't back yet?" I groaned, watching as Tama paced in front of me and trying not to squint. How was he so active this early in the morning? I'd been awake for five minutes, and I still felt like my head was full of rocks and my eyes full of dewdrops.

"Simba and Nala!" Tama shouted back. "Damnit, I shouldn't have fallen asleep…"

Suddenly, the events of the previous night came rushing back to me. Now some of those rocks had thorns coming out of them.

"I'm gonna go look for them," he said. He was using his take-charge voice again, the one that made every word he said a statement of plain truth. Usually when he used that voice, there was always someone that tried to dissuade him anyway. This morning, that person was me.

"Tama, wait a second, just…"

And he did. That was what shocked me. He waited, but it wasn't to patiently explain why he had to do this or why _only_ he had to do this or why there simply wasn't any way. He waited, and he looked me in the eyes, and suddenly I had the strangest feeling that if I told him to stay here and not go after them, he would've obeyed.

"Just…be careful," I said. Tama stared for a little while longer, than nodded.

"Yeah," he replied. And that was all. He was gone. And the rocks' thorns were bigger than ever.

It took him an hour to get back. Even from a distance, I and the few other cubs who had emerged from the shady reaches of our new home could tell he wasn't alone. At first, we thought he only had one cub in tow, and the talk was frantic about which cub it was. But by the time he was close enough for me to see the dirt streaking his face and the bits of grass poking out from his fur, he was also close enough for us all to see the yellow-furred, black-eared, and surprisingly muscular cub riding on his back. It had to be Simba; the only difference between this cub and the one I remembered from that day in the nursery was the size of the tuft on top of his head. And those muscles.

Thankfully, the other cub trailing a good ways behind was Nala, although she didn't seem to be any more awake than Simba was. Her shell-shocked expression wasn't all that surprising, considering what she'd been through, but there was something else troubling about her as well. Were those tear streaks lining her face?

Well, at least it wasn't because Simba was dead. As the sparse crowd parted and Tama walked over to a smaller, empty cave nearer to the water, I saw his eyelids flutter once or twice. Nala watched the procession long enough to see Simba slide down off Tama's back and crumple into the ground, then slowly shuffled back off towards the grass line. The rest of the crowd was fairly quick to disperse as well.

Before I knew it, it was just me and Tama again. I had spent most of the last hour feeling horrible about how snippy I had been with him earlier, so I figured now was a good time to start making up for it.

"Is he okay?" I asked softly, cautiously walking over to where Tama had dropped Simba. I hadn't noticed how much Tama's chest was heaving when he had passed me a moment ago. I couldn't imagine how he was still able to stand after carrying him for so long.

"He's out cold, but he'll live," Tama grunted back. "You'd think jumping off a two-hundred-foot cliff would hurt him more, but all I can find is a couple scratches and a lump on his head."

"He jumped off a cliff?"

"That's what Nala said. She doesn't remember much, but she thinks he saved her from drowning too."

"Wow…what a night."

"Yeah," he sighed. "What a frigging night."

Redemption time. "How much did you sleep last night?"

"No idea." For some reason, that was funny to him. "I wasn't trying to fall asleep, if that's what you're asking."

"I wasn't," I said back. "Go to sleep. I can keep an eye on Simba if you need me to."

Tama's smile was worth a thousand years of blindness. "I'm gonna lose track of the amount of stuff I owe you for, aren't I?" he said.

My heart bubbled, and I smiled back. "I won't start counting," I said, unable to think of something more charming to say back. Oh well. That was probably close enough.

Tama didn't waste any time going back into the larger cave with the other cubs. Instead, he just sat down right next to me, and laid his head down just a foot away from my paw.

"Thank you, Amani," he mumbled. "You're awesome…"

I wanted to say it. I wanted to be the first one to come clean, to put out all my emotions and all my stress and all the reasons why I couldn't ever sound as smart or witty or interesting as he was for all to see. Just three words, four if you counted his name. It wasn't just "You're awesome too, Tama." It was more than that. It was beyond that. It was part of that and part of a hundred other things that I could never tell another living soul.

_ I love you, Tama._

Anyone else would've told me it was stupid. I couldn't really love him. Not after just one day. Not when both of us were barely old enough to even know what the word meant. Not when he was the reason I was still alive today. All this was just a phase, just a fluke, just the particular brand of game my mind wanted to play today.

But I knew better. I hadn't loved him for a day. I had loved him for ten minutes, when I saw him coming back and realized I hardly even cared whether anyone else was with him or not. I had loved him for ten hours, back when I was the first to stand for him and the last that would ever desert him. I had loved him for ten months, ever since our eyes met in the nursery and I saw acceptance and friendship and a fire that I had kept burning all this time and would keep burning until the day I died. And I knew all this, and yet I knew nothing. It all meant nothing, if it wasn't shared. If he didn't love me back.

But that was something for another day. For all the days to come. Right now, I could be content with self-honesty, with the secret knowledge that I had found my place in this world and it was right next to this little brown lump of fur dozing off next to me. I was happy. I was terrified. I was free.

_I love you, Tama. I love you, I love you, I love you._

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_I'm participating in NaNoWriMo right now, so Part 4 probably won't be up until December at the earliest. NaNo is getting me into the habit of writing whenever I have free time, though, so that update should come fairly quickly once I start on it._


	4. Part 4

Well, here it is. Part Four of Three. Good God, this took...six and a half months to finish? Well, hopefully, the wait was worth it for you guys. I've just started Chapter 4 of "Growing Down", and considering how short those chapters generally are, I'm hoping that means I'll soon be working on Part 2 of "The Pridelanders". Yep, you read that right: it's finally (almost) upon us. A moment of silence, please, for my first published work reaching adolescence...thank you. Enjoy the dramatic, sappy, and everything in between conclusion to "The Shadow".

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**The Shadow – Part 4**

**Amani**

It's funny how clear things become once you stop lying to yourself. Nine months of telling myself that I was small, I was confused, I was young and stupid and naïve and unimaginably desperate…no, I was all of those things and they were called love. I was sick with passion, desperate for a shuddering touch, a stuttering smile. Anything was still something, wasn't it? A night spent next to him, watching his chest rise and fall and contemplating this sudden desire to brush the cowlick back from his eyes; stroke the fur behind his ears; draw myself into that big, inviting, invigorating brown chest...that affection I craved was all in my head, but now it only rented the space there. Now it only waited there for its opportunity to become real.

That was what made me nothing worse than curious when Simba woke up. That was what put the name "Pridelanders" in my mouth when he had asked for names. Even after I said it, when it became one of those things that sounds brilliant right up until you hear it coming from your own mouth, Tama's smile was all it took to give me strength again. I wasn't all different; I still didn't have a clue what I was doing or what I was supposed to say when Simba started looking at me funny. But I wasn't afraid of them anymore. Or at least, I didn't feel afraid anymore.

That afternoon was one of the best of my life. I had never felt such freedom, and it wasn't even half because of how far away we were from anything resembling a hyena. For the first time in my life, I saw the other cubs as just that: cubs. They were different, but in the end they were the same kind of different as me. And that afternoon, when I jumped into the river and swam out towards the crowd, they shuffled and parted and let me in. Just like that. Like I was one of them.

I was one of them, wasn't I? I always had been. And I'd figured that out months ago, really, on that day in the nursery when I just said the words I wished I would hear from someone else, and for a few seconds felt like they were true. And nine months later, here I was doing the same old thing again. Only this time, I didn't plan on shutting up.

By the end of the day, we were all exhausted, and I was almost incoherent with anticipation. That night would be the first time in the whole day I'd be alone with Tama; what better time to tell him about what I'd figured out? But when he walked into the sleeping cave, he looked an almost alarming breed of frustrated, the kind that was no big deal unless someone was stupid enough to try and dig through it. I'd noticed him talking with Simba about something earlier, and he hadn't looked too happy then either….actually, Simba had had a pretty distinct air about him as well. Like the air around a dead anteater. But after the mysterious and still unexplained events of last night, who knew what was going through his head? And who cared? Tama could handle it. Tama and I could handle anything. We were made for each other, when you thought about it: he was the strong, confident, conscientious one, and I was the fierce, fiery, and feisty young huntress with a shoulder ready for him to lean on whenever he pleased. One couldn't exist without the other. Neither even wanted to exist without the other.

But despite that, I couldn't tell him now. This was going to be the most important moment in my life, and I wanted it to be perfect. I mean, I wasn't scared of what he'd say or anything like that. No, I knew what he'd say, what he _had_ to say. But…it just had to be perfect. It wouldn't be perfect if Tama was mad about something else. So I'd just wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow would be perfect. Tomorrow would be the even better best day of my life.

Or, conversely, it could be the worst day of my entire life to the tenth degree. Guess which kind of day I was graced with.

I suppose it didn't start out all that bad, really. I woke up, did the whole stretch-and-yawn thing, noticed Tama still asleep beside me and resisted the urge to lie back down and cuddle up against his side, and eventually went outside. About half of the other cubs were already up, including Tojo, who looked like he was either starving or just about to puke up a few vital organs. I didn't stick around to find out. Nature wasn't just calling; it was screaming in my ear and beating me over the head with a hundred-pound tree branch. Listening to whatever Tojo had to say was even lower on my list of priorities than it normally was. Normally, I didn't really even have a list of priorities, except for the fact that talking to Tojo was usually near the bottom of it.

I made it to an empty patch of grass just in time to avoid leaving a trail, and took my time getting back. It was a beautiful day; why shouldn't I enjoy it? Also, I was just the slightest bit lost after having sprinted off in Aiheu knew which direction, but I tried to keep that away from the forefront of my mind. That is, until I finally happened across the river caves again, only to find them completely devoid of life.

Okay, then. No big deal. I mean, I was just all alone in the middle of somewhere that wasn't quite nowhere but had a pretty good view over the border. I allowed myself exactly one minute of unbridled panic, and then I composed myself and went to look for my missing pride. A half hour later, I was near incoherence again, and I finally collapsed underneath a threadbare pea-green shrub, utterly desolate and on the verge of tears. Which was exactly how the rest of the pride found me about ten seconds later, except I was officially over the brink of composure at that point. They had gone on a hunting trip and not noticed I was gone until they were already five minutes out. So much for being part of the group. Oh, and did I mention that they had only stopped just then to try to take down a heavy old kudu that would've made an absolutely perfect meal for everyone, and just when they were ready to strike it was scared away by the sound of rustling leaves accompanied by someone screaming at the top of their lungs?

Yeah. Apparently, that was me. I would've apologized, if I could've seen any of them well enough to make eye contact through the messy film of tears and snot covering my face. And I figured maybe if I couldn't see Tama's face, he wouldn't be able to see mine. To my benumbed mind, it seemed perfectly rational. To everyone else…well, I could see enough of their faces to have a good idea of what they thought of me right then.

I would say that the day more or less went downhill from there, except that I was kind of already at the bottom of the hill to begin with. So I guess the day went more or less underground from there, really. The only consolation I had over the next eight hours was that for every time I tripped over my own feet or kicked a rock in a full sprint and fell to the ground spitting every one of the embarrassingly small number of curse words I knew, Uruzi didn't fair any better. Faired a bit worse, actually, mostly because of how each mistake would just push her brow further down over her eyes and sharpen her tongue so much that I couldn't imagine how her mouth wasn't bleeding. And that made me feel great, until I realized around mid-afternoon that I was only happy because Uruzi was miserable. After that, I just felt worse than ever. As much as I would've gladly looked the other way if she, say, tripped into a boiling pit of tar filled with sea snakes and spiders the size of rhinos, I knew that deriving pleasure from her misery was making me just as bad as her. And more than anything, I didn't want to be like her, because Tama hated her. And if I was like her then he would hate me too. And after the day I'd had, that was a thought I couldn't even begin to bear.

By the time Kima finally made his first kill and kept us all from starving, my feelings about Tama were the last thing on my mind. Or rather, revealing them to him was. I was certainly thinking about him; there just wasn't a chance in the world that I'd let him notice now. Not after that morning. Not after spending the whole day teetering back and forth between smug satisfaction and what I could now call nothing else but despicable jealousy.

So that meal was just like any other. We were stood next to each other, ate from the same leg, and never looked at anything but our paws and the meal in front of them. The gazelle meat was sweet and juicy. Every so often, the meat under my chin would be salty.

I had hardly even finished digesting before we were on the run again. Fifteen minutes after we returned to the caves, the northern horizon had begun to glow, and fifteen minutes after that, we'd heard it. It wasn't a roar, not even a rumble; it was lower than that, more powerful than that. It was like a motionless earthquake; even though the earth was still, the sound alone nearly swept my legs out from under me. No one at the caves knew what it was, or what it wasn't. All we knew was that it was big, it was terrifying, and that it was coming straight for us.

So when Simba and Tama came crashing through the brush yelling about hyenas and they're coming and too many to fight off, no one thought twice about listening to them. And when Kima went up in the tree and Simba had a stroke of inspiration, no one was eager to belabor the point. And that was how, at the very end of the worst day of my life, I came to be fifteen feet up a tree with Afya and Uruzi off to my left and Tama on the branch right beside me. Alone with him, for the first time in the whole day. If I hadn't been equal parts mortified, terrified, and wincing from a massive stitch in my side, the whole thing would've been just ideal.

For a while, we didn't speak and hardly even moved, though I suppose it was more out of fear of being caught this time. But after a while, it became just like dinner. Between the distant baying of hyenas, the growling storm clouds up above, and the fact that Tama's forepaw was propped up on the rough wood of his branch and almost, but not quite, touching mine, I was about ready to either scream or just tackle him right off said branch. I was still calculating the odds of us both surviving the ensuing fall when he spoke up without any warning at all.

"You think Simba knows Nala's asleep?" he said in an undertone.

I blinked away my search for a good-sized bush to land in, and looked where Tama was gesturing. About thirty feet away, Usiku was saying something to Simba, who seemed to listening with rapt attention. Beside him, Nala's face was pressed into the rough wood of her branch, and her mouth was hanging open in what I hoped for her sake was a silent snore.

"Probably not," I whispered back. I think I tried to smile, but nothing really came of it. "Are you gonna tell him?"

"Not unless it looks like she's gonna fall out," he replied. "Long as she doesn't, it's kinda funny, isn't it?" He turned his cheesy grin towards me, but I still couldn't bring myself to smile back. His faded quickly, and he turned away with a bit of a sheepish look on his face.

Now I was really glad he didn't know my thoughts about him, because they were saying some very nasty things to my thoughts about how stupid I was to have blown the opportunity to start up a conversation. After a minute or two of bickering, the two groups got together and decided to do something about it.

"So…do you remember anything about your dad?" I said, spitting out the first personal question about him that came to mind. "Before he died, I mean?"

Tama turned his head again and gave me a strange look, and for far too long he didn't answer. My stomach twisted and my face got so hot I was almost dizzy from it, and the overwhelming feeling that I had just brought up a subject he really didn't want to discuss had free reign of my body for a second or two. But when his reply finally came as I started to figure out how I would apologize, it didn't sound offended at all.

"You know, I think you're the only lion who's ever asked me that," he said, sounding more surprised than upset. I went ahead and went through with my apology anyway.

"I'm sorry," I muttered. "I shouldn't have asked, it's none of my business…"

"No, it's…it's okay," he cut in before I could finish. "I don't mind. It's just…I didn't expect it. In a good way."

Of course, now that I felt the urge to smile, my first reaction was to bite my lip and push it back down again. Why couldn't I have functional emotions like all the other cubs?

"To be honest, I'm kinda glad you asked," he continued. "I guess everyone else just assumed I never met him. Of course, that's mostly my fault…I never really talked about him." He looked me in the eyes, and his sheepish look returned. "Or I told them he was dead."

"So he isn't dead?" I asked with a still stoic face.

"I don't even know," he admitted as he turned his gaze back towards Simba and Usiku. "I remember somebody standing over me when I was really little…he was talking to my mom about something, but I don't know what. And after that, the next thing I can remember is meeting Simba."

He paused and glanced over at me for a moment. When I didn't say anything, he looked away again. "That's all," he finished quietly.

He still wouldn't look me in the eye, which meant there were things still trapped inside his head that would fill in all the holes in his story. "Do you think he's dead?" I asked.

"I was told he was dead," he answered. "But lately I've started to wonder whether that was the truth."

"What made you change your mind?"

"Well, the fact that my mom would never say anything about how he died. Or where. Or why he was dead and we weren't. And she would get this empty look in his eyes whenever I asked. This…angry look. Eventually, I stopped asking, and just started wondering."

He paused once more, but I didn't know what more I could possibly say. By the time it occurred to me that this would've been the perfect time to put my paw on his shoulder, he was speaking again.

"And there's something else," he said. He was speaking a little bit faster now. "That I didn't tell you before. That one memory I have of my dad, it…it isn't a happy one. He was…they were arguing. He and my mom. I don't know what it was about, but they were fighting and then my mom yelled something right in his face and…"

"He left," I finished with a whisper before I could catch myself. I bit down hard on my lip and braced myself for Tama's glare, but all I got from him was a wry smile and a nod.

"I don't know when, I don't know why, but yeah, that's what I think happened," he murmured. This time, he looked up at the sky, right up at the shivering slice of moon that hadn't completely slipped behind the storm clouds. I could tell because it gleamed off his eyes and the fur behind his ears. "And someday, I'm gonna go find him, wherever he is," he went on matter-of-factly. "And I'm gonna find out why."

_Comfort him_, someone hissed in my ear. My paw toes curled around my branch, and stayed there. "Is that why you wanted to escape? So you could go look for your dad?"

"That was part of it," he replied. The moonlight was making his eyes shimmer like crystals. "I mean, in the moment, it was just about keeping us all alive, but…there's a part of me that's almost happy for the opportunity."

He was still looking at the moon; I ended up looking too, just so I wouldn't have to look at him and admit that I didn't have a clue of what on earth to say next. But when I finally forced myself to look down at Tama again, my gut twinged like one of the thorns we had gingerly avoided lying on had poked right through it. No wonder his eyes were shining. They were both filling with tears.

"I just want to know why," he whispered, his voice quivering and his toes clenched. "Why would he leave me when I was just a baby? Who would do that?"

_Say something._

The voice was back. It wasn't whispering this time. "Well, you still had your mom…" I pointed out weakly.

Tama's face had been despondent before. Now, it was just bitter. "Yeah," he coughed. "But then every day I'd walk outside and see Simba with his dad, just happy as can be. He never had the faintest idea how good he had things, how bad I wanted my life to be like his. To just have someone to wake up early and take me places and be there for me when I screwed up and no one else cared."

In the unspoken contest of who could grip their branch tighter, I was beginning to pull ahead again. As my legs went numb and my heart began to shrink, Tama turned to face, his eyes still burning even as the veil of tears over them grew thicker. "And then, when his dad died, I helped him get away. I took him to the caves, and I brought him food, and I was there for him when he cried about losing him. I loved him like a brother." His words were jumbling together now, and every sentence began and ended with a raspy breath that I knew was really a barely contained sob. "But every time I saw him cry, every time he missed his dad…I was _happy_. I was so…freaking happy that he finally knew how _I _felt for my entire life. It was like I had this little demon inside of me that fed off his misery and my jealousy. And ever time I let that demon loose, it got bigger, and more of me went away with it. And I_ hated_ myself for it."

At that moment, he seemed to realize what my face looked like. And at that moment, a single tear trickled out of his right eye.

"I still do," he whispered. And then he turned away, rubbing his eyes with his right paw and holding on to his branch so hard with the other that his whole left side was shaking. By the time thirty seconds had passed, my pulse had slowed back down to a steady thump, and Tama was still as stone.

And the wave of compassion I felt for him when I saw the look of utter despair on his face was enough to erase every bad memory of the last week, let alone that day.

"I'm sorry you're stuck up here with me," he said suddenly, so softly I barely even caught it. "You must think I'm insane."

"I don't think you're insane," I said as warmly as I could. "You're just…sad."

Tama huffed out a derisive snort. "Is that what they're calling it these days? 'Sad'?"

"That's not what I meant," I argued back, but still gently. "You still helped Simba even though you were jealous. You could've just left him out there and never visited him at all. That doesn't seem very selfish."

Tama was shaking his head almost before I finished speaking. "I was still selfish," he muttered. "I was just good at hiding it."

_Do it now_, the voice commanded. And I obeyed. Before either of us knew it, I had Tama's paw grasped between both of mine. And in my entire life, I had never felt so light, so proud, so unequivocally happy than I was when Tama looked down at our paws and then at me, and the rage and pain and hurt in his eyes bled out and drained away.

"You want to know what I think?" I whispered. "I think it doesn't matter if you think bad things, as long as you do what's right in the end."

Tama's eyes never left mine. He didn't make any motion to change that. "So…you don't hate me?"

Finally, for the first time in almost twenty-four hours, I managed a smile. "Tama," I said. "I could never hate you. No one could. If you were so bad that I was supposed to hate you, you wouldn't care so much about hurting Simba." On a whim, I added one last thought. "You wouldn't care so much about hurting me."

Tama stared for a moment, and then he smiled too. And then his paw shifted and turned until the pads of his toes were pressed against the pads of mine. And he shifted them a bit more, and they pushed up through the cracks in between them…

And then, just barely, ever so delicately, he squeezed.

"Thanks for believing in me," he mouthed, though it wasn't hard at all to tell what he'd said.

"It wasn't hard," I mouthed back. And now, I didn't even need the voice in my head to tell me what to do next. I'd been thinking about it all of yesterday and even more so all of today. If there ever was a perfect moment for what I had been dreaming about for nine months, it was now, with the wind at my back and the moon overhead and Tama's eyes boring into mine. Without my forepaws to help me balance, I was one ambitious gust away from falling right out of my tree, but those forepaws were occupied with more important things right now, like holding his own paw between them and never letting go for the rest of my life. And since I'd already picked out where we'd land earlier, there was nothing to stop me from simply drinking in the moment, slowly floating towards the point where I'd make it all mean something more.

Right now.

"Tama?" I said.

"Mm-hmm?" he hummed back.

"I…" He wasn't even blinking. Neither was I.

"Yeah?" he sighed. Was it just me, or did he sound just as excited as I was? Well, I'd find out in a moment. I squeezed his paw back one last time, took a deep breath…

And about twenty feet over to my left, someone else blew one back out.

"Gods, I'm so _bored_," Uruzi groaned, all four of her paws hanging over the edge of her branch and her head slumped down against the end of it. Tama glanced over, rolled his eyes, and then his paw was back at his side again.

"Hold that thought," he muttered through his teeth.

_Forget that thought_, I wanted to say. _At this point, it's gonna take everything I had to hold in my dinner._

"Yeah, but you're also still breathing the good air, so zip it," he said, his voice only an octave or two above a growl.

"Well, I'm sorry if not all of us are used to hanging off tree branches like apples waiting to be eaten!" Uruzi hissed back. Above her, Afya took inspiration from Tama and let her eyes drift up towards the clouds. Tama himself, meanwhile, looked like he was ready to jump right over me and let his claws win this argument for him, but before he could get out another retort, a throaty cry rang out from a tree way off to the right. It sounded like a birdcall, albeit one that came from a bird on the verge of coughing up an air sac, but regardless of the tone we all knew well what it meant. That was the last thing Simba had said to us before we started climbing: if Kima gave the signal, sit tight and stay quiet. And everyone knew that the birdcall we'd just heard was the signal.

"What the hell was that?" Uruzi said, her head swiveling back and forth trying to get a fix on the source of the echoing caw. Apparently, "everyone" wasn't quite the right word. "Was that a bird, or a…" Mercifully, Afya had managed to climb down far enough to jump down on top of Uruzi and slap a paw over her mouth by then. After a very brief struggle to shake off the smaller cub straddling her back, Uruzi finally got the message.

Now the already subdued forest was completely silent, and for an impossibly long minute time seemed to grind to a halt. I didn't even dare move my eyes, so all I could see was a three-foot wide patch of grass that was only visible through a gap in the bushy tangle of leaves attached to the end of my branch. I held my breath and watched that grass, and listened as hard as I could for the second birdcall signifying that the threat had passed. I waited, quickly sucked in another breath so I wouldn't pass out, waited, and waited a bit more. Inevitably, my thoughts turned back to what had almost happened.

I would've really said it. I was about to, even. The whole stupid sentence was already on its way out of my mouth when Uruzi, that…idiot ruined everything. Again. I couldn't even imagine how her mind could possibly function; surely with her head being so big, whatever brain she had inside it must just bounce around like a pond frog in a hotspring. I also couldn't imagine how she didn't realize how much everyone hated her. How much everyone was completely exhausted and exasperated just by seeing her walk into view and smile and giggle and preen herself like she was surprised to see everyone standing so steadily, what with the whole planet revolving around her and such.

Or maybe it was just me. I really, really hoped it wasn't just me. Then again, it couldn't be. Tama hated her, too. Because why else would he have shoved her away like that the other night? And hadn't he just rolled his eyes at her, like he had wished for nothing more than to be close enough to give her a great big nudge and send her careening off into the brush? Yeah, he hated her too. He better freaking hate her too. Or I swear on the gods, I'll push him out first.

A sudden streak of gray cut into the patch of grass I was still lazily pointed towards, and it was nothing less than a miracle than I didn't start bad enough to set the whole tree quivering like a fat roll on an elephant. It was enough to make the leaves shift and rustle ever so slightly, though. As the branch began to move, I shut my eyes and waited to hear the sound of approaching pawsteps, but at that exact moment an earsplitting clap of thunder escaped from the clouds and ripped through the forest, all other sounds nullified by the sheer force of the blast. Call it luck, call it fate…I couldn't have cared less at the time. I could figure out which gods I needed to thank later, once it was safe to move again and my stomach grew back to its normal size.

It was a while before I realized I should probably be trying to figure out who it was that we were hiding from. Of course, that would've required me to open my eyes, so I met my better judgment halfway and just decided to listen in on their conversation. That wasn't as helpful as I'd hoped, though; I heard a loud voice that sounded like it belonged to a hyena, and then someone stomping off, and then about a minute later something kind of shuffling and groaning that I couldn't even begin to identify. Until I finally worked up the courage to open my eyes. Then I identified it pretty darn quick. I also identified the fact that Tama was watching it too.

Well, there went my stomach again. And not because I was scared this time.

Looking for something else—anything else—to occupy my mind with, I found myself turned towards Uruzi again. She'd wised up to the fact that our would-be hunters weren't being very diligent at the moment as well, and I watched with a mix of interest and a tingly sense of foreboding as she renewed her efforts to get Afya off of her. Only this time, Afya wasn't prepared for the sudden motion, and she was thrown backwards much more quickly than I think she or Uruzi expected. Afya was perceptive enough to grab hold of another branch and scramble on, but Uruzi's momentum was a bit too much for her to handle. She flailed around wildly for a moment, and then her quickly slipping forelegs were all that was keeping her from crashing to the ground below.

It occurred to me that I should probably warn Tama about what was happening before Uruzi gave away our position. It also occurred to me that I would very much enjoy seeing Uruzi fall out of a tree. In the second it took me to ponder my decision, the branch had already shaken off its unexpected guest and Uruzi had already hit the ground hard.

Now that the hyenas were looking at Uruzi and, by association, me, hating Uruzi seemed like such a stupid thing to waste my time over, especially when it was surely going to result in my own death. I should've told Tama, and I knew that. And I was about to ask him what we were going to do next when I realized that the branch on my right side was empty too. And that on the ground below me, there was a sturdy-looking, brown-furred lion cub standing protectively in front of a helpless-looking Uruzi.

That would be Tama. Going down to rescue Uruzi. Leaving me up in our tree. After Simba and Usiku had already knocked out the hyenas and eliminated all of the present danger. After I had held his paw and looked into his eyes and was a small smattering of social graces away from making those hyenas look like little cubs nuzzling in the nursery. But that was no reason to be upset.

Okay. Fine. I didn't need a reason not to ever speak to him again, did I? No, probably not. He wasn't going to get one, in any case. Not later, and especially not now, when I had just climbed down from our tree myself and was stalking towards him with my teeth clenched and my claws gripping the grass like each individual blade was his chivalrous little neck. He was going to get something, though. That was for damn sure.

By the time my paws had touched grass again, Uruzi was coherent enough to get back to her feet without any help from Tama, who in the meantime was just kind of standing there not really doing anything. And, were it not for the very ill-timed arrival of another pair of much larger, much fiercer, and about a hundred times scarier hyenas, I would've used that lull in the action much to my advantage. As it happened, the next few moments weren't as much filled with glaring at Tama as they were with me seeing Tojo jump down right into view of the hyenas, hearing one of them gleefully figure out where we were hiding, and then running at a full sprint through the trees as the wind picked up and the baying of the hyenas grew louder behind me.

At some point, the baying stopped, and I heard a scream. If anything, I ran faster after that. Simba and Tama would've gone back to try to help whoever that was, but I wasn't Simba and my desire to follow in Tama's pawsteps wasn't really all that pressing at the moment. So I kept running deeper into the forest, and resigned myself to whatever survivor's guilt was in store for me later.

Eventually, I remembered where I was supposed to be running to: the fork in the river. The one at the edge of the forest. The one I had been planning on following someone else too, as my sense of direction was about as useful to me as a pair of wings to a fish. Determined not to dissolve into a sobbing mass of panic twice in one day, I forced myself to stop and get my bearings.

Right. Bearings. All the trees looked the same, and I couldn't hear water. That meant I was in the middle of the forest, which was pretty much exactly where I'd been a few minutes ago. So that didn't really help a whole lot. But I would not panic. I couldn't refuse to speak to Tama if I couldn't find him again. So I just had to find Tama. And then not speak to him.

I was a bit surprised by how quickly I was able to calm myself down just by thinking about him. Even if I was thinking about how pissed off I was at him. I couldn't be pissed and scared at the same time, I guess. And now that I could think a bit more clearly, I could hear a faint rustling coming from somewhere off to the left. That was good. Crashing would've meant hyenas; rustling probably meant another Pridelander. Maybe even Tama. I thought about calling out to him, but then I realized that that would probably count as speaking to him. On the other hand, I would never make it out of this forest alive if he passed me by. Die alone in the woods, or forgive Tama. Once again, I hedged my bets and decided to just follow the rustling and find the river that way.

It was tricky to figure out where exactly the noise was coming in what little daylight remained, but I could at least tell its general direction: coming towards me from the left and a bit ahead of me. I started walking forward until the noise was as close to being directly to my left as I could manage, and then I sat down and waited for whoever it was to run into me. If it was a lion cub, I could follow them, and if it was a hyena…well, if it was a hyena, they probably would've found me anyway and sitting her was just cutting my life a few seconds shorter. I think I was scared again by now.

But it wasn't a hyena. Or a lion cub. Because when the rustling finally sounded like it was right on top on me, not a single shrub or blade of grass moved. And then the noise was fading away again. How had I possibly missed them? Where were they?

And then a leaf floated down from above me and brushed past my nose, and I had my answer: Kima. The leaf even smelled like him a little bit. This was even better than it being Tama, actually; if anyone actually knew where they were going out here, it was probably Kima. And now that I knew what direction he was heading in, I knew where the river fork was. I could just follow him from below and keep track of him through the leaves he dislodged. Perfect.

For once, one of my plans actually worked out. I could already see the river off in the distance when Kima finally dropped back down to the ground and saw me. "Hey, Amani," he said. "Were you following me?"

Geez, were all of the younger cubs smarter than me? "Yeah," I answered truthfully. "Hope you don't mind."

"Nah, it's okay," he reassured me. "I just thought I heard someone behind me, is all."

I shrugged and grinned for a moment, and then continued to follow him all the way out of the edge of the river, which was swollen up considerably higher than its normal depth. The storm must've been much worse upstream.

"So what do we do now?" I shouted to Kima, who was staring at the raging rapids with a mixture of concern and his trademark curiosity.

"Wait, I guess," he shouted back. "Look at how rough it is!"

"Yeah…" I mumbled back. I was remembering the second part of our plan now: swimming across the river and crossing the imaginary border in the middle of it to get us outside the Pridelands where we could regroup. I wasn't a bad swimmer and I actually kind of liked rain showers, but mixing the two together like this didn't look like a whole lot of fun. Actually, it looked terrifying. And I haven't exactly had the greatest history of handling myself well under pressure. Which meant I spent the next few minutes imagining all the various ways this river could be the end of me. I guess I was just in a morbid mood today.

Somewhere between a tree collapsing onto me as I was halfway across and some sort of violent death by giant mutated piranha, Nala and Tojo burst out of the woods, both of them gasping and heaving for breath. By the time the piranhas had been replaced by crocodiles, Afya and Uruzi had arrived as well. And as a hyena bayed somewhere far off in the distance and I finally came back around to the reason we were jumping into the river in the first place, Tani and Tama emerged onto the riverbank about a dozen yards upstream and quickly joined the pack of Pridelanders gathered at the rendezvous point.

Well, at least I wasn't thinking about hyenas anymore. The spot in my mind they had taken up just a moment before was now occupied with trying to remember why I was angry at Tama. It came back to me pretty quickly once Uruzi asked him where Simba was.

"I thought he was with you!" Tama said a bit loudly to Nala, the volume of his voice betraying the distant vestiges of panic plucking at the ends of his vocal cords.

"He went back to get Usiku after Jua…" Nala said before trailing off. Suddenly, I remembered the horrible scream I had heard earlier. Well, hello there, survivor's guilt. Thanks for stopping by.

"Did anyone else see them?" Tama asked the crowd, all of whom replied in the negative. He didn't take that well, and it was no wonder that he didn't; a quarter of our pride was missing, including its de facto leader. Who was also his best friend. As Tama turned away from the river and stared back into the darkness-soaked woods, I remembered something else, from our conversation in the tree earlier. He said he had been so jealous of Simba, and so happy when his father died…was that what he was thinking about now? Was he still jealous of Simba? Was the thought even entering his head, as it was mine, that he might turn back around and leave him behind, that his little demon would break free for just long enough to ruin everything?

Like I had so many times before, I looked down at Tama's paws. Come to think of it, they were probably the part of him I was most familiar with; not surprising, considering all the times I hadn't been able to bring myself to look him in the eyes. I got to know a lot about him from his paws, like which one he leaned on he was standing (the forepaw on the right) and which one had a tiny little scar on it from where I'd accidently stepped on it one night when I was sneaking out one night to use the grass (the back left one, and boy, was he not happy about that). And after a while, I could even read his emotions a bit just from what his paws looked like. Whenever he was angry, his paws would clench up and the very tips of his claws would come out. Whenever he was excited, he would lean forward and balance on the pads underneath his toes. And whenever he was nervous, he would plant all four paws firmly on the ground and splay his toes out until the pads on the bottom were white. That was how he'd looked when Scar had walked into the den two nights ago. That was how he'd looked after he tackled me in the grasslands before that.

And that was how he looked now, staring off into the woods with steadily rising but still silent dread in his eyes.

I had thought I felt low earlier in the day; now I knew what the real thing really felt like. He couldn't have possibly had any deeper secrets than the ones he'd given to me tonight, and what had I just done with them? Judged him for them. Feared him for them. Just like he thought everyone else would have. Just like he must've thought I wouldn't.

Was he jealous of Simba…hadn't I just told him it didn't matter? Hadn't I already seen him place the lives and livelihoods of every cub in attendance here before his own a thousand times over? Hadn't he already told me, sobbed to me, that he was horrified at himself for lapsing into selfishness even once? Hadn't he just risked his life to defend Uruzi, someone he didn't even come close to liking, because it was his natural instinct to put aside his own personal feelings and do what he knew was right?

Yes. He had. And I had hated him for it.

There was no getting around it. For one reason or another, I hadn't been able to tell him what he meant to me, what I hoped I meant to him. And now I knew I never would, for so many reasons. Cowardice. Jealousy. Mindless obsession that might be nothing more than a hormonal balance, might be nothing more than temporary. Yes, all of those things. But they were not the true reason, the one that I just realized now.

There was only one true reason, and it was that we were simply not made for each other. He was strong where I was weak. He was brave when I wanted to run and hide. He kept his mind of others when I could only think of myself.

But most of all, he just didn't deserve someone like me. And I could never, no matter how many lives I lived or days I saved or apologies I made for everything I've done, deserve someone like him.

"Okay, everyone stay put here," Tama said. "I'm gonna go look for them."

Even though I couldn't bring myself to speak, the other cubs were more than willing to give voice to what I was thinking. "You're not going anywhere, Tama," Afya shouted over the concurring arguments of the rest of the pride. "We need you here more than we need you lost out there too. I'll go."

"We need you here too!" Tama began to argue back. As we all knew he would.

"Hey, I could go look for them!" Kima interjected, tearing his gaze away from the river and bounding back over to the group. "I can go through the trees like I did before. They'll never see me up there!"

"You're not going anywhere either, Kima," Tama answered quickly, and I was a bit surprised to see Afya shaking her head as well. "I'm going, and that's final."

Tama stood tall and turned around, just in time to see the tuft of Kima's tail vanish into the forest canopy. "Son of a…" I heard Tama mutter.

"Leave him," Afya said resignedly. "You'll never catch up to him now."

After a moment of deliberation, Tama nodded in reluctant agreement, and then walked back over to us. Over to me.

"You okay?" he said quietly. I just nodded and looked away. And of course, he noticed.

"Hey…" he murmured. "Amani, what's wrong?"

"I'm fine," I murmured back. Thank the gods it was fully dark by now; I had only one shred of self-worth left to hold onto now, and that was that Tama would not see me cry over him. Never would.

I raised my head a little and looked off in the distance at nothing in particular. Behind me, Tama didn't move. _Go away!_, I wanted to scream at him. _Go help everyone else! Go be the hero we all need! Don't waste your time on me!_

A few seconds passed. He was still there. Finally, another few seconds after that, I heard him sigh.

"All right," he said softly. And he was gone.

Now I could cry. But I wouldn't. Not now, when our living through the night was anything but a guarantee and composure was the only thing close to sanity I could claim as my own. So I stared at the water and waited, until Kima pushed his way back out of the forest with Simba and Usiku and Jua in line behind him. Until Tama helped make a bridge across the river and waited until I was on it before he followed, right behind me. Until the hyenas and the other lion came, and Tama was the second one to help Simba push the boulder over on top of them, and I was the third. Until we walked for days and hours, and finally stopped for the night after only a few minutes had passed.

Until I woke up cold and alone in a crowded watering hole, surrounded by desert and trapped in a prison of my own creation. And him: the warden, the bars, and the shaft of light creeping in from above. My own prison. My own nightmare.

There was no denying it. Any of it. It was all my fault, it was all exactly what I wanted, it was all so perfect that I couldn't go a single minute without wondering what I would do without it. I wouldn't have thought it was possible to love someone and hate being in love with them. Now I knew it was very simple. It happens when you take it too far, and you love someone so much that, for all the happy times and blissful moments, you can't bear to see it happen because you know someday it'll all go wrong. Someday, you'll hurt them, and you'll never be able to forgive yourself for it. I knew this, because I had finally realized that this was what I had become, what I had brought myself to. I was inconceivably, irrevocably, unequivocally in love with him, and it was for that reason that I couldn't allow it to happen. One way or another, he deserved better than me.

It was one of those decisions that was easy to make and even easier to regret. The next morning, I would leave. Before he was awake. Just get up and start walking, and stop once I couldn't walk anymore. Of course, I knew in the back of my mind that I would never go through with it. But imagining that I would do it was so comforting, so…familiar. So normal. It was what I was best at, wasn't it? Imagining things. And never doing them.

And the funny thing was, after nine months of imagining a whole lifetime's worth of things never done and things never even attempted, the one I finally settled on this night was the first one I could remember. Nine months ago, I had imagined I was big, and that's what I imagined now. Only it wasn't just size this time; it was a concept, a creed, a way of life. I wasn't strong, but I could fake it well enough to convince myself I was. I wasn't brave, but I lived like I was. I wasn't a natural hero, but I wanted to be one enough that I could manage if I tried. I wasn't big, but I refused to let my fears be bigger.

Powerful thing, the imagination. Big thing. Scary thing.

Sometimes it scares me how much your imagination can change you.

• • •

I've never been an early riser. I enjoy my sleep, and nine months ago I would've told you that it was because I enjoyed being alone too, that the world just between here and there was mine and only mine, and I didn't want to share it with anyone. Now, the first thing I noticed when my eyes opened was how empty the space beside me in the little cavern I'd spent the night in was. And the second thing I noticed was the argument going on outside it.

I couldn't tell who was being shouted at, but I could certainly tell who was doing the shouting: Tama. Only he didn't sound…angry. Well, he sounded angry, I suppose, but it wasn't anger that was driving his voice. Anger has a certain sharpness to it; no matter how loud or soft it was, there's always a little part of it that remains controlled, that remains intentional. There was nothing like that in Tama's voice now, no edge to his words. He didn't sound like someone who was angry as much as he sounded like someone who was losing control of something he desperately wanted to keep intact. I could only guess at what it might be, though. Only a few words were distinct enough to pick out.

I got to my paws somewhat gingerly, both because of all the strain I'd put them through the day before and because of the inescapable feeling that I wasn't supposed to be hearing what was going on out there. Well, to be honest, I wasn't hearing much even after I moved out from under the outcropping. And I wasn't seeing anything at all. A dense fog had moved in at some point during the night, so thick and so impassable that I didn't want to move much farther out for fear that it was just as solid as it looked and I would run smack into it.

So I stayed right at the very rim of the outcropping, and I listened as best I could to the argument I wasn't supposed to be hearing. I suppose I was either doing a very good job of listening or a very poor one, because I didn't even notice the sound of approaching pawsteps until they stopped somewhere off to my left.

I turned slowly, with a sensation a lot like the one that came with being caught sneaking out of the den after sundown itching in my stomach. The fog must've been thinning a little bit, because I could just barely tell who it was I was staring at. And who was staring back at me.

For the longest time, Afya didn't say anything, and I didn't say anything either. We just stared at each other and analyzed each other, and listened to the commotion off in the distance add a couple more voices to its repertoire. When she did speak, it was without warning and with a tone of abject seriousness that, on a better day, I might have interpreted as concern.

"Help him," she said in something close to a whisper. Even without her ensuing motion towards the distant argument, I knew exactly who she was talking about. But why was she saying it? What was I supposed to do? What _could_ I do?

"How?" I asked.

Afya blinked once, then again. "Bring him back," she answered simply. And then she turned around and pushed back into the mist, and all I could hear a moment later was the receding tick of her claws against the ground.

_Bring him back._ I had a feeling I wasn't supposed to take that literally. So how was I supposed to take it? Afya had to realize I wasn't as smart as her, wasn't as quick as Nala or as strong as Tani or as good of a friend as Simba. What could I do to Tama that none of them could manage?

I braved a bit more of the veiled earth before me and walked forward a little farther. At first, nothing came across my ears but the gentle rippling of the waterhole, and for a moment I held onto the faint hope that the argument had finally ended. But when I listened closer, I picked up two voices still speaking. Still arguing. Almost shouting now.

"…_you don't know how he would handle it!_"

Literally shouting now. Or at least, Tama was. I would've wondered who the "he" was, but I was just starting to get used to not having half a clue what anyone was talking about. No reason to stop the process now.

No reason to think that when Afya told me to "bring him back", she meant for me to go strutting out there and smack Tama a good one for getting upset. Over whatever it was that had upset him enough to scream. I wasn't very enthusiastic about that plan, quite honestly. For more than one reason.

Was it cowardly? Yes. But then again, I was a coward. I was a shadow. Always behind the great ones, the ones who could actually be smart and be personable and think quickly and _do_ things. Always present when things were bright, and never around when the darkness swept in. So what could I do? What could I be, other than scared and shy and alone?

_I could be Tama's shadow._

Well, wasn't I already? I followed him everywhere he went. But I wasn't with him now, so that couldn't be true. What did that make me, then? It made me exactly what I'd thought I was before; a shadow, fading into the background the instant it was needed most, the instant when its owner most needed it to anchor them to reality. And that was true, wasn't it? He needed me. Not Afya, not Simba. Me. His shadow. His anchor. His friend.

His friend. His more-than-friend. His secret.

Maybe we didn't deserve each other. That didn't mean we didn't need each other all the same.

Finally, I put my head down and walked right through the fog, towards where I'd last heard Tama's voice cut it in two. Where I was going, what I was getting myself into, what I would say to him once I got there…I let each thought occupy my mind for only a moment, and then nudged it along into oblivion again. I'd only had a few times in my life thus far where I'd been sick enough of being a coward to push past the instincts that made me one, and right now was one of them. And it was due to Tama again. Actually, they'd pretty much all been due to him. Now I was sure that it was need I felt burning in my stomach and the back of my throat. I wasn't composed enough to completely reject the notion of him deserving a future better than one shared with me, but now I was at least comfortable with making him suffer through it all the same. I suppose, if you looked at it sideways, that was an improvement.

The air was getting clearer with every inch I advanced, but I could still only see about ten feet in front of me when I heard echoing pawsteps again, heavier ones this time. Faster, too. Someone was running towards me, almost sprinting by the sound of it, the echoes of their pads not even a gallop so much as an unwavering drumbeat. And, naturally, whoever it was invisible behind the feathery columns of fog that were still halfway through clearing out for good. _Just once_, I thought, _just once, I'd like to actually see what's running at me like I'm the last zebra in a thousand miles of desert. It'd be such a nice change of pace to be able to rationalize being afraid of it._

Here, though, I knew that there wasn't anyone around besides the rest of the Pridelanders, so for even lesser of a once I was able to rationalize _not_ being afraid. Instead, I just backed off a little bit, sat down, and waited for whoever this was to say whatever cryptic thing they felt the need to say. Send me running off to do whatever it was they needed me to do. Tell me that I was the only one who could do it.

Come skidding to a halt no more than a half dozen yards away from me with brown eyes wide as a stampeding elephant's and teeth gritted in incomprehensible agony.

I blinked hard and stood up just in time to not trip over myself as I took another step back. Was that really Tama over there, with his claws stretched out at nothing and his eyelids squeezed shut to keep it from getting in? Was that really him, with his breaths coming in quick and ragged like a tree branch being tossed around in a thunderstorm? Was that really him, muttering to himself with dripping eyes without giving even the slightest indication that he knew I was there?

"Don't…" he whispered. I could almost hear his resolve breaking apart, the branch shedding leaves in the fury of the wind. "Don't say it, you…don't mean it. Please don't let me mean it…"

It was only now that I remembered what I had come out here for. I took a step forward. Tama didn't turn around, only flexed his paws for a moment and then continued stumbling forward.

"He's your…he's my friend, my respons…just…"

My paw twitched, and something skittered across the bare ground. A leaf, dried and brown and long since dead.

"Just don't be him, please, oh gods, don't make me be him…it's not me, just his father…"

He stopped.

"Just his father…"

His right forepaw shot over to his left leg, and his claws bit down straight through fur and into flesh.

"Just his _father_…_NO!"_

His scream was as sudden as the bright red streak I saw open on his ankle. "_Get out!" _he sobbed. "_GET OUT OF MY HEAD!_"

Then he disappeared behind the fog for a moment, and in that moment I couldn't take it anymore.

"Tama?" I said quietly, announcing my arrival as gently as I could. Tama whipped around with flattened ears, and eyed me with the frenzy of a cornered gazelle. And backed away.

"Tama, what happened?" I continued, swallowing my way past the swollen lump of fear and panic that had taken over my throat. "What's wrong with you?"

He spent a lot of the next few seconds blinking, and then his pupils receded just slightly it was as if he'd finally recognized the presence of another living thing. Another animal like him.

"It came back," he answered, looking in my direction but not at me. Through me, at something off in the distance that had him terrified almost to incoherence. "I thought it was gone, and it came back, and I couldn't…" He paused to shudder. "…stop it."

It took two heaving gulps to get my voice in working order this time. "What came back?" I breathed out.

"Back there, it wasn't even me talking," he gushed. I don't think he had heard me speak. "It wasn't my voice, it was his, but it _was_ my voice and…"

"Tama, stop it!" I commanded, more out of desperation than frustration.

He blinked again, and a little more color drained back into his eyes. "Amani…" he said, finally calling me by name for the first time since he'd arrived. "Amani, I'm…I shouldn't be here."

"Tama, what are you talking about? You're not making any…"

"Sense, I'm not making any sense? No, I'm not making any sense, am I? I never do, because I-I'm crazy, aren't I? I'm the one with the little voice in his head, the little demon that wants him to spit in the face of everyone who ever tried to help him, ever tried to care about him."

Now the storm that had dislodged Tama was upon me. Now it was all coming back: the forest, the thunderstorm, the frantic chase through the forest…and what he had said just before it.

_It was like I had this little demon inside of me that fed off his misery and my jealousy. And ever time I let that demon loose, it got bigger, and more of me went away with it. And I hated myself for it._

Gods above. I didn't have any better way to comfort today either.

"You're not crazy, Tama," I said weakly, trying to fall back on my previous reassurance for lack of any better idea. "You're just…"

Tama roughly shook his head, his brow and muzzle crashing together to block off his eyes. The cut on his ankle was seeping blood all the way down to his paw now. "Crazy, not crazy, what does it even _matter_?" he growled back, rising to a shout halfway through. "It's still the same thing. Other people get lucky, and I hurt them for it. You might as well start calling me S-Scar…"

I would've thought he truly believed that had his voice not despondently cracked on the final word. In the heat of the moment, that was all I needed to hold on to. "You are nothing like Scar," I told him. I was a bit surprised when I had to stop for a moment to wipe the moisture away from my own eyes. "The Tama I know is _nothing_ like Scar!"

Now his irises were dilated black again. "Yeah, well, maybe the Tama you thought you knew never existed," he hissed. He sounded furious, but not at me. Please, gods, not at me. "Maybe it was just his worthless little attempt to hide what he was really like, just so he could get closer to his prey. Maybe he's nothing more than a maggot leeching off of anything better than him. Maybe he shouldn't have even…"

"_Shut up, Tama_!" I screamed. Later, I would feel bad about yelling at him, but now would not be later for a good while yet. "What are you hurting yourself like this?"

"_Because I deserve it!"_

Now, after all his rage and all his ravings, he fell silent, with only the heaving of his chest disturbing the glaring sunlight starting to stream through the mist. Now, after all this time, he looked me in the eyes. Now that I couldn't even see them anymore.

"Why are you hurting me like this?" I tried to ask him back, but my throat finally closed off for good in the middle of it and so all I could really manage was a squeak. But that was enough. His demeanor shifted, not completely off the track he'd been careening down but a few steps back from the edge of it. His madness was gone; now there was only grief. Only guilt. Only a thin line of crimson snaking down across the stone.

"I hurt everyone I'm around," he whispered back. "No matter how hard I try not to."

"Tama, that's not true and you know it!" Now that he was starting to cool down, I found myself starting to heat up. "The only way you've ever hurt me or anybody else is by doing this to yourself!"

He looked down at the gash on his leg. I tried not to. "You can beat this!" I half-encouraged, half-begged him. "Please, just listen to yourself!"

From the moment I said it, I knew he was going to take it the opposite of how I'd intended. "All right," he mouthed mechanically before raising his voice enough so I could hear it. "Tell Simba he's better off without me."

And that was that. That was his tail disappearing off in the general direction of absolutely nowhere and my tail still laid out flat behind me. Not moving. Just watching him leave. Letting him leave.

I would've expected half a dozen different emotions to fly through my chest at the sight of Tama running away from me, never to return. But the one I settled on after a few moments was situated a bit low, in my stomach and my paws. And it burned, like the touch of a white-hot flame against an open wound. My stomach burned like fire. Like lightning.

Like anger. At myself, at Afya, at the entire gods-damned planet for letting me be their stooge and their plaything and their _shadow_. But especially and almost exclusively at Tama. For so many things now, some of which probably weren't even his fault. But this was. This notion that I would just let him walk off to do something far worse to himself than a cut on the leg. This notion that he _could _just walk off on me. Leave me. No, that was simply not going to happen. We might just be friends or we might be destined to be together forever, but no matter what our futures held, there was one thing it sure as hell wasn't going to include, and that was him leaving me.

It wasn't hard to catch up to him. He wasn't going anywhere fast with his leg in the condition that it was, and just as I had discovered last night that I could run faster than I even knew I was capable of when I was running away from something, I found out today I could push myself beyond my normal limits in order to chase something down. What a change of pace.

Almost as if he knew I was coming, Tama slowed down as I began my approach. But my interpretation of his mental state was a bit too forgiving; when I finally caught up to him, he jumped almost as violently as he had when I'd first spoken to him before. Or maybe it was more because of me tackling him at full speed and knocking him into a chaotic roll that ended with him flat on his back and me standing over him with my chest heaving and my nose hardly six inches from his. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

"Amani…" he began to say, in that wonderful little reasonable voice of his that meant everything was going to be okay, everything was gonna be fine, and don't bother trying to help me because I'm too busy shouldering it all myself to ask for it, thanks. That, and he looked like he was about to start crying again. Neither option was one I was going to let him take this time.

"No," I said firmly, cutting him away before he could go off on another tirade. "You're just gonna give me some more crap about how you don't deserve my help, and I don't want to hear it. What can't you just let me into that thick, stupid skull of yours?"

"I don't know…" he moaned. He still wasn't looking me in the eyes, and I had to swallow back the habitual sympathy I felt bubbling up from my stomach when I saw how empty his gaze was. I couldn't afford to let him off the hook now, not with the state he was in. Not with another much more familiar feeling still broiling just a few inches below that sympathy.

"I don't want to yell at you, Tama, but I don't know how else I'm supposed to get through to you!" I admitted, trying to provoke a more rational response from him. Instead, I got silence and a stare focused somewhere around my neck. "Listen to me," I continued after it became clear I wasn't going to get anything by beating around the bush. "You…are not a bad lion."

The unfocused brown irises beneath me disappeared again, and the tiny flame behind my own flared into a bonfire. "Yes, I am…" he argued back in a shaky whisper.

"_No, you're not!_" I shouted, not regretting raising my voice one bit this time. If I had to literally smack that into his stubborn little head, I was more willing to do so now. "You're the only one who thinks that, Tama!"

Silence again, and this time he even tried to squirm out from under me and escape again. Before he could even make it a full inch, I planted my forepaw right in the center of his chest and stopped that nonsense in a hurry.

And somehow, that single motion cut through both of us more than anything else had even come close to managing. He stopped dead in an instant and, for the first time that day, opened his eyes all the way. And as for me, the old feeling was pushing up from my stomach again, not burning but freezing everything in its path. I kept my focus on my glare and gradually, slowly, the pressure lessened and it drained away again. But not all the way down, just to a staging area, to a clearing right on the edge of the forest. I couldn't take much more of this.

Tama's eyes still weren't on mine. "Look at me," I ordered him.

He didn't move. He was still staring at my paw on his chest, and my toes where they had unconsciously dug up underneath the outer layer of his fur. Eyes still wide open. Eyes still in a world far beyond the one I was stuck in.

"Look at me!" I yelled.

And finally, he did. Finally, he looked me in the eyes, and the war was lost. The icy storm swept forward, and didn't move into my legs and back and tail so much as simply appeared there without a moment's delay. I was overpowered before I even had a chance to realize that I had nothing left, that all I'd been running on was adrenaline and a wild, maddening promise to not give in to myself, to not be the one to break first. And here I was, with Tama right where he needed me to have him, flinching and even shying away for a moment. From nothing more than a look from his glassy, shattered eyes, deep and rich as his coat in a way that no other natural color could compare to, in a way that every lion in our pride recognized as being the essence of safety, of comfort, of home. Whatever they needed, whatever they desired, it could be found there, in those endless brown twilight skies clouded over with enough goodwill to shield them from the brightest rays of the world around them, but clear enough to let through enough to keep them happy.

I'd seen this in him before he'd even known it himself, and now I was seeing it when he had no hope of ever allowing himself to use it again. And somehow, I knew I always would, no matter what. Because of what was cutting a crackling course through my legs and back and tail. Because of what I'd known would be the end of me sooner or later.

Because I was Amani. Because I was shy and compassionate and unspeakably desperate. Because, even now, I was afraid.

"Please…" I whispered, now finding that it was me who had to force herself to look Tama in the eyes. "Please just listen to me. It doesn't just hurt you when you're like this. It hurts everybody to see you like this. Its hurts Simba and Nala and Afya and Tojo…and most of all, it hurts me."

Something else was flashing through his eyes now. The same thing I hadn't been able to identify back at Pride Rock. "How…" he began to ask.

"Because I care about you!" I shouted, though this time it was only because I'd completely lost control of what was coming out of my mouth. "Because we all care about you! Because we love you!"

And there it was. I'd spent so much time thinking about how, when, where, why, and now all I needed was a deserted watering hole and enough desperation to not care about the consequences. And a single moment.

"Because _I _love you!"

I had thought his eyes were wide before; now, even his tiny black eyelashes disappeared under the reddened skin bordering his eyes. And as for me…I felt nothing. No shuddering earth behind my feet, no clap of thunder overhead, just an overwhelming sense of complacency. It wasn't that what I'd said wasn't true; it was just that, after how much time I'd spent agonizing over it, it had really been just that easy. Just a few words cobbled together that meant something larger than themselves.

And what did that all add up to? It added up to me asking Tama the question I'd kept silent for half my life and, for the first time, not being afraid of what the answer would be. Regardless of whether he loved me back or not, what mattered was that I'd been honest with him. There was nothing I could do now but keep standing over him and wait for him to answer, so that was what I decided to do. Meanwhile, Tama was still halfway paralyzed, his right forepaw hovering in midair and his eyes twitching madly but never breaking away from my face.

"Is…is that true?" he finally whispered, his searching gaze more powerful than I'd ever seen it be before.

"Yes," I answered almost as quietly. "It's always been true."

Now his eyes dropped to the paw I still had centered in his chest. At some point, I'd tightened my grip, and now his skin beneath my paw was white. With an unconscious gasp, I released him and backed off a little, giving him room to get to his feet. His eyes still never left mine, not until he was fully on his feet and he started to turn. Until he started to walk away.

I had just a moment for my old fears to come flying back with twice the force they'd ever had before, but only that. Tama had only moved a few feet when he stopped again, his tail lifted just enough to keep the tuft from dragging the ground and his head tilted toward the ground. I could hear him breathing even from that distance.

It took him thirty-seven seconds to speak. I know, because I counted every single one of them. It was my attempt to stay at the same even emotional level I'd promised myself I would keep. A mostly failed attempt, but at least I'd always know that number.

"The first time I ever saw you, you were off under a rock in the nursery back when we could hardly even walk," Tama said. "I guess I noticed you because all the other cubs were in this big pile near the watering hole, and there you were off by yourself. I guess I thought you were a rogue like me, that you would be just like me. I don't know why I didn't go over to you right then…Simba must've dragged me away or something. But I've always remembered that, because it was the first time I had ever seen someone so different from everyone else. And it was the first time I ever saw your eyes. The first time I ever thought of how…how beautiful they were."

I could see something twitching at the very corner of his mouth, even when he fell silent. Now I dared to hope. "When I first talked to you, it was in the nursery again. I don't know if you remember it, but it was that day Simba had to go babysit the little cubs and I ended up going along too. I didn't even know you'd be there. I hadn't hardly seen you since that day by the watering hole. But when I did see you, the first thing I saw was your eyes again. And I remember that the first thing I thought when I saw your eyes was, 'Why is she here with the little cubs with eyes like that? Why haven't the birds stopped singing and the trees stopped swaying and all the lions in all the world stopped breathing, when someone next to them has eyes like that?' I couldn't figure it out. I guess I thought maybe you were stuck-up or selfish, or maybe," he began to chuckle, "you were just annoying."

He stopped for a moment, and I could've sworn he was going to turn around then. "You proved me wrong," he murmured.

His paws scuffed against the ground, all the tension fully gone from the hardened tendons. Now I dared to dream.

"I tried to talk to you every chance I got after that," he continued. "I wanted you to notice me so badly. I wanted you to look at me again and I wanted to see your eyes glow like they did when I talked to you in the nursery. I didn't even know _why_ I wanted you to…I didn't understand anything about what you were to me. I just knew that I'd known you for hardly a day, and that had been enough to make you more important to me than anyone else in the whole pride. In my whole life. Because you were the one lion who made me feel normal. Because you were the only lion who saw just me instead of Simba and I together."

Even from the strange angle, I could still see the wry grin that streaked across his face. "Stupid thing to be worried about, I know, but…there was always some part of me that wasn't at all like Simba. It's probably why I'm friends with him. And you were the only one who noticed."

Well, that was a perspective on that whole situation I hadn't expected. All I could remember from that day right now was five hours of tripping over everything in my path so I didn't have to look away from him and trying not to get sick all over his paws in the process. "And then, the last three days…" he said, his tone dropping into a deep, but not melancholy, groan. "Gods, what can I even say except that you were…what kept me going. That I was trying so hard to hold myself together just so I wouldn't disappoint you. Because I knew that you wanted me to be brave, because that's what everyone expected, but…but you were the only one of them who made it important to me. Who made me want to be brave and strong and noble, if only so I could be as brave and strong and noble as you wanted me to be. As you kept showing me I could be."

Now he turned around. Now his eyes were still shining and wet, but his lips were pulled back with unfathomable happiness. Now the bands around mine fell away and my face lifted to match his. Now, finally, I dared to believe.

"I love you too, Amani," he said without the slightest hint of hesitation, all the while closing the gap between us one lengthy step at a time. "I always have, and I never even knew it until yesterday, when you saw me for who I was and you didn't run away. When you were there for me when no one else was. And I can't ever even begin to repay you for that, so all I can promise you is that for as long as I'm alive, I'll do whatever it takes to be there for you too. I want to be there for you today and tomorrow and all the days after that, and I want to stand by you in the day and hold on to you at night, so I never lose you. So I can always protect you. So I can wake up in the morning and look into your eyes and…and know that everything's gonna be okay. That we're gonna be okay."

All of a sudden, we were nose to nose, and this was the closest I'd ever been to him. And from here, I could see everything. I could see how deep the truth he was telling me went, and how his cocoa-tinted eyes actually had little flecks of green swimming around in them that I'd never noticed before. I could see that he'd holed up his desires and his passions and his agony just as long as I had mine, and that released into the open for the first time they were enough to make the sun just another star made irrelevant by the brightness of its moon, by the radiance of his words.

"And I want to kiss you, Amani," he whispered. "I want to kiss you more than I want anything else on this planet. I want to put your head on my chest and watch your eyes slide closed and kiss you and kiss you and never ever let you go. But I always waited, I always held myself back because I couldn't do it if you didn't kiss me back. Because I never knew if you wanted me to…"

Now he paused for a moment. I was still staring at his eyes, so I couldn't see at all what he was doing with his lips or with his tongue. But I did see something flash behind them for a moment, as if a decision had been made, and then I saw them flutter shut. And then the next thing I knew, I couldn't see anything, because my own eyes were closed and my back legs had slipped out from under me and there was just the slightest touch of moisture where my lips had once been dry.

He had kissed me. He had really kissed me, and now my eyes were opening and his mouth was open and my entire body felt like it was splitting at the seams. What had he said? He didn't want to kiss me unless I kissed him back? Well, all right, then. I could do that. Except not right now, because right now he was leaning forward again and his head was dipping down and under my chin and then pushing back up and my paws were around his neck and then suddenly we were both flat on the ground, irreparably tangled in each other's forelegs and nearly heaving for breath even though we'd only moved a couple feet. I couldn't get close enough to his mouth to return his favor, so I settled for pushing my muzzle into his rumbling neck and breathing him in and letting his scent envelop and take over my brain, to be first in line in an entire galaxy of experiences I was having for the first time today. And while I was doing that, Tama was more than content to keep a shaky grip on the backs of my shoulders and press his own lips into the little patch of downy fur behind my ear, alternating between peppering the side of my neck with hundreds of smaller but infinitely more powerful kisses and whispering the same three words over and over again so only I could hear them: _I love you. I love you. I love you._

We ended up on our sides, and stayed that way for gods knew how long. Time was a distant memory, something easily forgotten in the heat of the moment. Hours melted into instantaneous seconds, and so we spent the rest of the day in blissful ignorance, knowing nothing of anything outside of us, outside of the little patch of dirt and stone we'd collapsed on top of. Eventually, our passion—or at least, that was the closest name for it that I could think of—subsided to simple affection, and then that dissolved into nothing more than a sleepy feeling in my legs and a warm heartbeat skipping along right beside mine. It was around then that Tama suggested that we move off into the grasslands. So we'd be more comfortable, he said. There was a large part of me that consisted only of the ecstatic little shiver that squirmed its way through my chest when he whispered his proposal into my ear, but there was a larger part of me that felt the same feeling in a different way, by knowing that it was so the rest of the pride wouldn't see us. So the moment could last longer.

We walked quickly and settled down even more so. This time, our descent towards the ground was much more composed; Tama lied down first, and I followed suit a moment later, hardly even getting into a crouch before his neck was craning towards me and my head was diving under it. Whatever awkwardness remained from our first encounter fell away once I was next to him again, once my ears filled with the sound of his purrs and my nose tingled with a sharp, almost cinnamon-like scent that I'd never been near enough to truly experience before. Once his paw curled around mine and our toes weaved together of their own accord, there was nothing else left to be done. Now we could rest easy, and I could slowly begin to realize that this wasn't a dream, that I really loved Tama and he really loved me back, and that I was really lying here now with the sun overhead and our sides pressed together and his tongue every so often washing over my ears.

But with that realization came a gradual sinking back down into reality again. Not far enough to make the moment any less enjoyable, but enough that I could start thinking about what this would mean for the future. The most pressing matter was the scratch on Tama's leg, and what its existence meant for the pride. Right now, all he needed to have it cleaned up since I'd managed to snap him out of his madness today, but now that he had pledged himself over to me and I had for all intents and purposes done the same, at some point soon I'd have to figure out how to keep it away for good. And sooner or later, the rest of the pride would find out, and then…

Then what? Nothing. Nothing would happen. Nothing could happen, because this was what had been meant to be all along. This was why I'd overslept, and why the fog had kept me from going too far out, and why Afya had told me to help him in the first place. This moment right here, with both of us and only us, was much more than chance, much more than fate. I'd never been one to believe in destiny before, but I couldn't think of any other word for what we had now, what we would always have. And if Uruzi was jealous, then let her be jealous. Let her head blow up like a bullfrog and explode in a fireball of raging green flame. She couldn't hurt me anymore. Nothing could hurt me, because I loved Tama and he loved me back, and in the grand scheme of things that was all I would ever need.

In the meantime, though, Tama was still bleeding. He still needed some help with that.

With a gentle, distracting rub against his neck, I leaned down and lifted his paw up to my lips, trying to lick around the edges of the wound more than inside it. Nala could deal with the hardy stuff later; right now, my only interest was making him more comfortable, and judging by the satisfied groan that slipped out from deep in his throat I wasn't doing too bad of a job at it. But as much as he seemed to enjoy my particular brand of treatment, there was still a quickly growing frown on his face. I wasn't surprised; he knew where the gash had come from just as well as I did.

"It's okay, Tama," I said softly, raising my head back up to rub under his chin again. "You're gonna be okay."

The slight movement of his jaw told me he was smiling, but his voice didn't give off the same sentiment. "I want to believe you," he said back a bit morosely, drawing his injured paw away from ever so slightly. I reached out and grabbed it again before it could reach his chest.

"You can," I told him. "Because I'm gonna help you."

He moved his head back and looked me in the eyes. Now I could see his smile. "Thank you," he said. "For everything. That, and everything else. I'm sorry I…"

I slipped my paw toe up over his lips, and he fell silent. If there was anything I was surprised about, it was how easy this all was. "You don't need to apologize," I said. "Just promise me you won't hurt yourself again."

Tama's eyes clouded over, then became more resolute than I'd ever seen them be before. "I promise," he replied. "And…and I promise that I'll help you too. With whatever you need, whatever you want. Always."

It was my turn to smile now. I moved my head in close and pressed my muzzle against his ear, like he'd done with me before. "I'd like that," I whispered.

As I moved back a bit, his head dropped and his ears tickled my throat as he pulled me into a strong nuzzle. "I'd like it too," he murmured back just before giving me a long, slow lick right on the corner of my jaw. For a minute or two, the sound of heightened purring was enough to drown out even the birdcalls heralding the arrival of the new day.

"So it's a deal, then?" he finally said, moving his head back up over mine. Once it was there, he kissed me again, right on the little crevice where my head ended and my neck began. "We'll stick together no matter what?"

It seemed like such a simple question, and one I thought I had known the answer to for months. But despite that, I still gave myself a moment's pause before answering. Maybe just to try to think of what exactly to say, maybe to make sure I really meant it. Maybe even just for dramatic effect. But as I pulled back and gazed into his eyes one last time, every anxiety I might've had faded more quickly than any mist ever could. There was no need to say anything new, no need to think about my answer. I was right; I had known it for months, the way only a lover could. The way only a pair of creatures who were so intimate that words were just something used for the benefit of hearing the other's voice while thoughts and wishes more than sufficed as far as communication was concerned could. The way only a friend, only a sibling, only someone so close they could be your shadow could.

And so I looked up at him once more, first at his eyes and then at his lips. And then I closed my eyes and leaned in close, and I kissed him back.

"Deal," I mumbled through my thoroughly occupied mouth. And as Tama's paw slid up to my back and his tongue stretched out to meet mine, I realized one last truth to add to the day's total.

Turns out, sometimes it pays to be a shadow.

* * *

I can't really decide whether I like this chapter or not. The ending is admittedly sappy, but I wasn't aiming for anything before that, so I have somewhat mixed feelings about its quality. Suffice to say, I'll honestly be glad to get back to writing in somewhat simpler prose. Not that I didn't enjoy writing for Amani (if I'm being perfectly frank, I love the character to the point of unhealthy obsession), but I also like it when I get to switch things around a bit. 'S why it's more fun than I might have originally expected to have more than one active story going at the same time. Anyway, as I said before, keep an eye out for a new "Growing Down" chapter fairly soon, and then (ohJesusChristI'mreallyfinallythere) Part 2 of "The Pridelanders".

...someday, I'll get over the fact that I've written over two hundred thousand words on a Disney animated film, and people like what I've written. Someday. Not today.


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